A Back button for your whole Mac
Every browser has a Back button. It’s the most used button on the web. Your Mac, the thing that holds all those browsers and everything else, doesn’t have one.
What “Back” should mean on a Mac
Here’s a normal minute. You’re in a Notion doc. A Slack message pulls you into a thread. The thread links a PR. The PR mentions a dashboard. Now you want to get back to the doc.
⌘Tab gets you to Notion, the app. But which page? Which window? You’re hunting again.
That’s the gap. Your Mac remembers apps. It should remember places. A place is a tab, a doc, a window or a coding session. Back should take you to the place.
Back and Forward, everywhere
With Hopper, press ⌃⌥← from any app and you’re back where you were: that doc, in that window. Press it again to keep going back. ⌃⌥→ undoes a Back.
It works across apps the way a browser works across pages. No switcher to scroll through.
Two flips for the back-and-forth
Most switching is between two things. So there are two gestures for it, both double taps:
- Toggle: double-tap ⌘ to flip between your two most recent apps.
- Toggle Tab: double-tap ⌥ to flip between your two most recent tabs, windows or sessions, even inside one app. Two Chrome tabs, two Claude Code sessions, a doc and its spec.
Writing code against a spec? Double-tap ⌥, read, double-tap again.
Three more ways back
- History (press and release ⌃⌘): every place you visited, newest first. Kept for 30 days by default, or as long as you choose.
- Recently Closed: close a tab by accident and it waits here, ready to reopen in its own browser.
- Now Playing: jump straight to whatever is making sound, like the tab with the video, or Music. If several things are playing, pick from a list.
All of these are on the Hotkeys & Gestures cheat sheet.
Try it
Hopper is in private testing for macOS 26. Join the waitlist.
Questions people ask
Is there a keyboard shortcut to go back to the previous app on a Mac?
⌘Tab, then release, switches to the previous app. With Hopper you can also double-tap ⌘ to flip between your two most recent apps, or press ⌃⌥← to go back to the exact place you were, not just the app.
What’s the difference between Back and Toggle?
Back walks through places in order, like a browser. Toggle (⌘⌘) flips between your two most recent apps. Toggle Tab (⌥⌥) flips between your two most recent tabs, windows or sessions, even within one app.
Can I reopen a tab I closed by accident?
Yes. Recently Closed keeps tabs that closed while their browser kept running, and reopens them in the same browser.
Can I change the shortcuts?
Yes. Every one of them can be changed or turned off in Hopper’s Settings.
