Why I built Scopo

I never set out to make an app. I set out to stop losing my train of thought.

On any given day I have three or four projects open at once. A client app, a side project, the thing that pays the bills, and whatever I'm tinkering with that week. Each one has its own world: an IDE, a terminal, a browser full of tabs, a chat window, an AI assistant. I keep them organized with macOS Spaces, one Space per project. That part works beautifully.

Then I press Cmd+Tab, and macOS forgets all of it.

The moment that broke me

Cmd+Tab is app-centric. It shows you every app, everywhere, regardless of which project you're actually in. I'd be deep in a feature, reach for my terminal, and get a wall of icons: Slack from another client, a browser from a side project, music, mail, three Finder windows I forgot were open. By the time I found the right one, the thought I was chasing was gone.

The organization I'd carefully built with Spaces meant nothing the instant I tried to switch.

I kept thinking: the computer already knows which Space I'm in. Why does it pretend it doesn't?

Building the thing I wanted

So I started building a switcher that respects the boundary I already set. One Space, one project, one scope. When I press Cmd+Tab, I want to see the windows for this project and nothing else. If I need something from another project, I can reach for it deliberately, not have it shoved in my face by default.

That single idea turned out to be the whole product:

• The display is the project boundary.
• The switcher is scoped to the screen and Space you're on.
• Everything else stays out of your way until you ask for it.

It took a lot of fighting with private macOS APIs to make it feel instant and native, but the principle never changed.

Why I'm sharing it

For months Scopo was just a tool on my own machine. It quietly fixed the most annoying part of my day, and I stopped noticing the problem because it was gone.

Then I'd pair with someone, or screen-share, and watch them dig through a cluttered Cmd+Tab, and realize: this isn't just my problem. Anyone who runs more than one project at a time feels it. Developers, designers, freelancers juggling clients, people who just keep a lot of windows open.

So I'm putting it out into the world. One Space. One scope. No clutter.

This devblog is where I'll write about what I'm building next, the weird macOS internals I run into along the way, and the occasional story about how using my own app changes how I work. Thanks for reading.