— Docs

A radial menu for macOS.

Circa puts every shortcut one gesture away. Trigger the menu with a hotkey or mouse button, point at a slot, click — an app, a script, a snippet, a system action. Then you go back to what you were doing.

What Circa is

Circa is a launcher you operate with motion. Trigger your activation binding, a circular menu fades in under your cursor, you flick toward the slot you want, and click. The selected action fires immediately. The menu disappears.

The activation binding is anything you can press: a keyboard chord, a mouse button (including the side buttons most apps ignore), or a Logitech HID++ button on a supported mouse. Tap to toggle the menu open, or hold to keep it open only while pressed — your pick.

There is no list to read, no fuzzy search to type into, no results to disambiguate. The whole interaction is a single physical gesture.

Why a radial menu

The radial layout is the reason Circa exists. It is faster than a list, and the speed comes from geometry, not polish.

Every item on the menu sits at the same distance from the cursor. Fitts' law says selection time is a function of distance and target size — so equal-distance items are equal-cost to reach. A vertical list is the opposite: the eighth item costs eight times as much as the first.

Callahan, Hopkins, Weiser, and Shneiderman first measured this in 1988 — pie menus were faster and produced fewer errors than linear menus across every task they ran. Kurtenbach and Buxton extended the result to marking menus in 1993: once you know the direction of the item you want, the menu doesn't need to render at all. Your hand has already moved.

Circa is a marking menu with a launcher attached. The menu shows up when you need to look. The gesture is the same whether it's drawn or remembered.

The menu has a center knob and a ring of slots around it. The center is reserved — it shows the active profile name or, in music mode, the current track and a volume scrub. Slots are everything else.

You choose how many slots a menu has. Fewer slots mean wider angles, which means more forgiving aim — six slots is the sweet spot for muscle-memory selection.

Slots

A slot is one binding: a position on the menu mapped to exactly one action. Slots are the unit Circa is built around. You add them, remove them, reorder them, group them under a parent slot that opens its own sub-menu.

Slot kinds

App. Launches or focuses a specific application.
System action. One of a fixed catalogue — lock screen, toggle Do Not Disturb, cycle audio output, set volume, dark mode, brightness, screenshot, empty trash, sleep, restart, and more.
Keystroke. Sends one or more keyboard chords with optional waits in between. A single chord covers most macOS commands; a sequence covers Shortcut launchers, Vim-style leader keys, or any app with multi-key bindings.
Script. Runs a shell, AppleScript, or JavaScript-for-Automation script. Use this to invoke a macOS Shortcut, hit an HTTP endpoint, or anything else you can write in a few lines.
Snippet. Pastes a fixed string into the app that was frontmost before you opened the menu.
Dynamic. A live label — Circa runs a script on a schedule and the first line of output becomes the slot's title. Click fires a separate action.
Cycling. Rotates through a list of child slots on each click. The active child's title and icon are mirrored onto the slot.
Group. Opens a sub-menu of further slots. Groups can nest.
Profile switcher. Opens a sub-menu of every saved profile so you can swap with a flick.
Mode switch. Switches the menu into music mode (or back). See Music mode below.

Profiles and overrides

Circa has two ways to vary the menu by context.

A profile is a complete menu snapshot — its slots, its appearance, its activation. You can save up to six profiles and switch between them manually, either from the Profiles tab in Settings or with a Profile switcher slot.

An app override replaces the active menu's slots whenever a specific app is frontmost. Overrides are keyed by bundle ID and applied automatically; pressing Tab while the menu is open temporarily swaps back to the default. See Profiles for the difference and when to use each.

Music mode

Music mode replaces the standard ring with transport slots — play/pause, next, previous — and a center knob that scrubs volume. Open it from a dedicated hotkey (defaults to ⌥ M), the tray menu, or a Mode switch slot inside any profile.

What Circa is not

Not a clipboard manager, snippet expander, window manager, or notes app. Slots can trigger those tools, but Circa doesn't replace them.
Not a typed launcher. Spotlight, Raycast, and Alfred are excellent at search; Circa is excellent at selection from a small known set.
Not a menu bar tool. The menu appears under your cursor, where the work is.