Window Hints

Window Hints is a macOS utility that replaces the usual window switcher with a faster, keyboard-first approach. Instead of cycling through every open window with repeated keystrokes, you press a hotkey and each visible window shows a letter hint. Type the letter and you jump straight to that window. The whole interaction takes a fraction of a second, and your hands never leave the keyboard.

The problem it solves is one that accumulates quietly. With ten or fifteen windows open across two monitors, the default Command Tab switcher becomes a guessing game. You hold the key, squint at icons, and hope you land in the right place. Window Hints shortcuts that entirely by labeling windows on screen so the choice becomes explicit. There's no memorizing the order of your app stack, no hunting for a tiny preview thumbnail, just a letter per window and you're there.

Under the hood, the app needs macOS accessibility permission to enumerate your windows, read their titles, and bring any of them to the front. Once you grant it, the experience feels native. The hints overlay appears the moment you invoke the hotkey, and dismisses the instant you press a letter or hit Escape. There's no persistent UI, no dock icon cluttering your setup if you don't want one, and no system resources burned when you're not actively switching.

It works across multiple displays without extra configuration, which matters if your workflow spans a laptop screen and an external monitor. It also plays nicely with Mission Control, so you can invoke it inside that view when you're already browsing spaces. For users who have adopted Stage Manager, there's an experimental integration that extends the hint system into that environment, though the developers flag it as still maturing. Similar experimental support exists for Ghostty Splits, a terminal multiplexer, and Chrome Split View if you keep many browser panes open side by side.

The audience is anyone who works keyboard-first. If you already reach for hotkeys before your mouse, Window Hints fits into the same philosophy and trims a bit of friction from something you do dozens of times an hour. It's popular among developers, writers, and power users who run many apps at once and value not breaking flow to chase a window.

Pricing is unusually simple. You can subscribe at 12.99 per month, which gives ongoing updates and presumably priority support, or pay a flat 7 dollars once and own it outright. The one-time option is the cheaper path for most people unless you specifically want to support continued development on a rolling basis. There's no free tier beyond whatever trial the download offers, so you'll need to decide fairly quickly whether the workflow improvement is worth a few dollars.

What sets Window Hints apart is its single-minded focus. It doesn't try to be a clipboard manager, a launcher, or a window organizer. It does exactly one thing, window switching by letter hint, and does it quickly enough that you stop noticing it's there. For a small utility that runs in the background, that's the highest compliment.