Lodestar
Keyboard navigation for macOS. Destination over process.
or the notarized zip · v0.9.2 · macOS 13 or later · Fair Source
The premise
Most window tools ask you to manage windows. Arrange them, resize them, cycle through them. Lodestar starts from a different premise: you never wanted to manage windows. You wanted to be somewhere.
So every gesture names a destination, and the system takes you there. Full screen, instantly, silently. hyper S and you are in Slack. Not launching, not arranging. There.
One grammar spans launching, windows, the inside of apps, and the web. Learn it once. Your hands know it everywhere.
The specification
Going places
| hyper space | The searcher. Type, land full screen. Ranks by what you actually use. |
| hyper A…Z | Graph chains. Letters you chose, walked to any app or browser profile. |
| hyper ⇥ | Window chooser for the focused app, most recent first. |
| hyper ⏎ | The web bar. Links, domains, and searches, each routed to the right profile. |
| hyper 1…9 | Jump to a window by its position. 9 is always the last. |
| hyper X · ⇧X | Back and forward through the attention timeline. |
The layout
| ⇧ on a summon | Beside me. An equal split instead of full screen. |
| hyper O | Flip the split, horizontal to vertical. |
| hyper ⇧1…9 | Slide the focused window to that position. |
| hyper [ · ] | Throw the focused window to the previous or next display. |
| hyper Z · ⇧Z | Undo and redo the layout, one global timeline. |
| hyper 0 | Sweep every background window out of sight. Never dialogs. |
Inside the app
| hyper , | Scroll mode. j k for lines, d u for half pages, gg and ⇧G for the ends. |
| hyper . | Menu search. The frontmost app's entire menu bar, fuzzy. |
| hyper ; | Click hints. Every pressable element wears a label. Type it to click. |
| hyper ⇧; | Chain clicks. Each click relabels the window. esc leaves. |
Saved worlds
| hyper ` A…Z | Marks. Letter addresses for specific windows, bound with ⇧. |
| hyper ' A…Z | Breaths. Whole saved layouts, restored across restarts. Apps relaunch. |
| hyper ' ' | Update the latest breath to the current world. |
The system teaches itself
| hold hyper | Peek the map. The graph and every window's index, while held. |
| hyper ? | The cheat sheet. Every gesture and your live bindings, one sheet. |
| esc | Clear anything. |
The philosophy
Every feature faces one test before it ships: does it become a fixed gesture the hand owns, or does it force a fresh decision every time? If it forces decisions, it gets cut.
That is why chains wait indefinitely instead of timing out. Why successful navigation is silent: the screen changing is the feedback. Why windows you did not summon are left alone. And why the system teaches its own map: hold hyper, and every destination shows itself.
The full reasoning is written down: the design, the reference, and the engineering ledger, where every platform assumption was probed before it was trusted.
Install
Open it, grant Accessibility, and Lodestar wakes on its own. Hyper is right ⌘, which stops being a command key. That is the trade, and it is configurable.
Your config is one commented YAML file with schema backed completion, validated against your machine. A global CLI comes along: lodestar check lodestar diagnose lodestar apps. Agents get a stable contract in AGENTS.md.
SIP stays on. Spaces stay untouched. One private API call, documented. 163 tests.