Switcheroo – An open source Little Arc for Safari

This post details a macOS app that recreates features from Little Arc in Safari. The post and source code were available for members only until April 3rd, 2024 and are now public.

One of Arc’s best features is Little Arc — a small Quick Look like window that appears whenever you click a link in an app other than Arc, which previews the webpage and allows you to choose which Space to load the link into. Spaces, of course, allow you to have separate personas like Work, Personal, etc. so that you can be logged into web services across multiple accounts without the need to log out and in dozens of times per day.

Safari has a feature similar to Spaces called Profiles. However, Safari doesn’t give you a Little Arc like feature that allows you to choose which Profile you’d like a link to load in.

Though I’ve built a few Mac and iOS apps, this is far from my area of expertise. So I asked someone who is an expert; Zhenyi Tan (@zhenyi@mastodon.social). Zhenyi is a prolific creator of useful utilities such as Vinegar and History Book and the inventive Gibberish. I just knew if I needed help, I could ask Zhenyi.

So, we tooted. Not a few hours later came Switcheroo – a small open source macOS app that can be set as your default browser and becomes a sort of interstitial to allow you to choose which Safari Profile you’d like the link to be loaded in. I’ve been using it daily for a few weeks and it is great.

You can download the latest version here. We are open sourcing the code in hopes that others would like to contribute in making Switcheroo a bit more useful. Take a look at some of the issues on GitHub to get a sense for some of the features I personally would like to see added. I may work on a few of them myself. Feel free to cherry pick one if you’d like to help out.

My thanks to Zhenyi for the amazingly quick turnaround and the collaboration.

Update in mid-November 2024: I’m still using Switcheroo every day and Zhenyi was gracious enough to submit a few updates to keep it up-to-date in Sequoia.