What pounce is
A native, keyboard-first command palette for macOS where every command is a file. Free, MIT, no account. Summon, aim, pounce.
Pounce is a free, open-source, native command palette for macOS: a fast, dmenu-style picker you summon with a hotkey. Hit ⌘Space, fuzzy-type, hit Return. It launches apps, runs commands, answers quick questions inline, and hosts a handful of built-in modes: clipboard history, an emoji and symbols grid, screenshots, and more.
Every launcher lets you open an app. The moment you want it to do something of your own, you are reading an extension SDK, making an account, or waiting for someone else to publish the thing you needed twenty minutes ago.
Pounce takes the other road. Its whole personality is one idea: every command is a file. Drop a shell script in a folder and it's in the palette: five lines, two comments, no plugin API, no extension store, no account.
It is MIT licensed (every feature in these pages, no paid tier), and it installs standalone from Homebrew with no Nix required.
What's in it
| Apps & actions | One list, fuzzy-matched. Type saf, get Safari; your own commands sit in the same list, ranked the same way. |
| Quick answers | 2*847, 72 f in c, 100 usd in eur, 14:00 utc in pst: the answer pins to the top row and ⏎ copies it. |
| Clipboard history | Your recent copies in a two-pane view, searchable, with an optional paste straight back into the app you came from. |
| Find Files | Search by name as you type, over Spotlight's own index. ⏎ opens, ⌘⏎ reveals in Finder, ⌥⏎ copies the path. |
| Emoji & symbols | One grid for both: type command and get ⌘, arrow and get →. Plain Unicode, so it pastes anywhere. |
| Settings panes | Every System Settings pane by name: "Displays" goes to Displays, not to the Settings window. |
| Windows | An opt-in ⌘Tab that walks your actual windows, newest first, with type-to-filter. |
| Plugins | Docker, SSH hosts, Tailscale, Spotify, Bluetooth, audio devices, GitHub, caffeinate. Off by default, on by id, each still just a script. |
A screenshot browser, a live camera peek and a searchable cheatsheet live beside them.
How it behaves
- Instant. The daemon holds the hotkey in-process, so a press lands in an already-warm program: no shell, no client to spawn, no round trip.
- It learns. Match quality, then frequency × recency on a 72-hour half-life, plus a nudge for apps you've just installed. What you meant is usually the first row.
- Quiet. No account, no sign-in, no telemetry, nothing to log in to and nothing reported back.
- Offline. Two outbound calls exist and both are optional: daily reference rates for currency conversion, and an hourly look at pounce's own release tag. Either can be turned off in config; everything else works with the Wi-Fi off.
- Updates are nudged, never automatic. A pending release pins itself to the
first row and notifies at most once a day;
⌘⏎skips that version. Applying it is always your keystroke. - Diagnosable.
pounce doctoranswers the three questions that go wrong: is the daemon up, is Accessibility granted, is something else eating your hotkey.
Questions
Free how? Free as in no money and free as in MIT. Read it, fork it, ship your own; there is no licence key, no trial timer and no tier above the one you have.
Another launcher? There are good ones, and if you want a marketplace of ready-made extensions you should use one of them. Pounce's angle is ownership: the extension API is the shell you already know, and nothing you write depends on us staying interested.
My scripts? They stay yours, as files, in your own folder. Nothing is imported into a database, so backing them up is backing up a directory and moving Macs is copying one.
Inside a haus machine
Pounce runs perfectly well on its own, and that is how most people meet it. It is also a room in haus, the macOS layer, where the daemon, the hotkey and the Accessibility grant are wired up with the rest of the machine and survive a rebuild. Standalone and in-the-house are the same app; only the wiring differs. See the Launcher room.