summon, aim, pounce

a keyboard-first command palette for macOS, where every command is a file

_{pre-release · every path that could lose your work is either reversible by design or stops to ask you first. that's the intent, not a warranty — config init won't clobber a config you already have, and brew uninstall pounce is the whole of the way out. tell us what breaks.}

---

Hit ⌘Space, fuzzy-type three letters, hit return. Pounce is a small Swift daemon that draws a dmenu-style picker over your screen — your apps, your commands, one ranked list — and is gone again before you've thought about it.

A command is one shell script. The metadata lives in a comment. That's the whole API:

#!/bin/bash
# pounce: name = Say Hello
# pounce: icon = hand.wave
osascript -e 'display notification "🐾" with title "Pounce"'

Save that as ~/.config/pounce/commands/hello.sh and it's in the palette on the next open. No registry, no rebuild, no restart, no account.

Want a marketplace of pre-built extensions? Use Raycast. Want a launcher you can read end to end and change with a text editor? Pounce.

brew install hausfold/tap/pounce
brew services start pounce       # the palette daemon
pounce --request-accessibility   # approve the prompt, once

Then pounce skill install — one command, and the coding agent on this Mac knows how to drive the palette. macOS gives ⌘Space to Spotlight; installing is where you take it back. MIT, no telemetry, no cloud, no login. macOS 14 Sonoma or later, Apple Silicon.

the manual

📖 hausfold.co/docs/pounce — and it only lives there: installing (including freeing ⌘Space from Spotlight), using the palette, what ships in it, writing a command, every config key, every flag.

Inside a haus machine it's the Launcher room, which installs and configures all of the above for you, running the same notarized release Homebrew hands you.

in this repo

• ai/SKILL.md — the agent surface, so "ask me which one" works first try. It ships inside the binary too: pounce skill prints it, pounce skill install places it
• AGENTS.md — hacking on pounce: the build, the layout, the invariants
• THANKS.md — what pounce is built on, and the people who ran it before it was public
• NOTICE — the third-party notices that ship inside the app
• pounce --help · pounce doctor — the authoritative flag list, and what to run when a key does nothing

⌂ hausfold