AppKitFocusOverlay

A simple package for displaying the current focus (nextKeyView) target path for an AppKit window.

Press and hold command-option-[ key to display the focus key path for the currently focussed window
Press and hold command-option-] key to display the focus key path from the currently focussed UI element.

Supports both Swift and Objective-C projects.

Why?

It's important for your app to be keyboard navigable and that the tab path makes sense to a user. There's been a bit of discussion of recent regarding keyboard navigation on iOS, highlighting the -UIFocusLoopDebuggerEnabled YES launch argument option for iOS apps in Xcode.. The question was posed as to whether this also worked for AppKit, and the short answer was no.

I built the prototype for this a few years back for use in my own apps. It's not as frictionless as adding a launch argument but it's straight forward enough to add. Given how useful it's been for me I thought I'd package it up cleanly and make it public.

Demo

Click here to see a demo video of the focus overlay added to the wonderful 'ControlRoom' application.

There are also very basic AppKit example applications (using both Swift and Objective-C) in the Demo subfolder you can play with.

Simple setup

Add the https://github.com/dagronf/AppKitFocusOverlay package to your application.
Define a global instance of AppKitFocusOverlay in your app and access the instance within a method that gets called early in your app's lifecycle, such as applicationDidFinishLaunching.

import AppKitFocusOverlay
let _globalFocusOverlay = AppKitFocusOverlay()

func applicationDidFinishLaunching(_ aNotification: Notification) {
   // Force the focus overlay instance to init.
   _ = _globalFocusOverlay
   ...
}

Features

Custom hotkeys

You can define the hotkeys to use in the initializer of the instance. By default, these are command-option-[ and command-option-], but you can change them to f13 and f14 (for example) if you want.

Note that as of macOS 15.0 Sequoia shortcuts must include a modifier that isn't shift or option

This was an intentional change in macOS Sequoia to limit the ability of key-logging malware to observe keys in other applications. The issue of concern was that shift+option can be used to generate alternate characters in passwords, such as Ø (shift-option-O).

There is no workaround; macOS Sequoia now requires that a hotkey registration use at least one modifier that is not shift or option.

Example

import AppKitFocusOverlay
import HotKey               // Available due to AppKitFocusOverlay dependency 

let _globalFocusOverlay: AppKitFocusOverlay(
   windowHotKey: HotKey(key: .f13, modifiers: []),
   viewHotKey: HotKey(key: .f14, modifiers: [])
)

func applicationDidFinishLaunching(_ aNotification: Notification) {
   // Force the focus overlay instance to init.
   _ = _globalFocusOverlay
   ...
}

Objective-C support

You can add AppKitFocusOverlay to your Objective-C project easily.

@import AppKitFocusOverlay;

@interface AppDelegate ()
/// Define an instance of the focus overlay
@property (nonatomic, strong) AppKitFocusOverlay* focusOverlay;
@end

@implementation AppDelegate

- (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(NSNotification*)aNotification {
   /// Create the overlay and attach
   AppKitFocusOverlay* focus = [[AppKitFocusOverlay alloc] init];
   [self setFocusOverlay: focus];
}

@end

Notes

You may need to embed the swift libraries (Build settings) if your app doesn't already if you're planning to distribute an archive or release build to (eg.) your QA dept.
If you need to customize the hotkeys for objective-c you'll need to fork this library and change the code in AppKitFocusOverlay.swift, as the HotKey library is not exposed through Objective-C and as such the hotkey-setting initializers are not exposed to objc.

Screenshots

Thanks!

Uses HotKey to define and detect hot-key presses.

License