Borma

About

Borma is a macOS app launcher. Press a global hotkey and a small search panel appears. Type a few letters of an app’s name, press Return, and the app opens. Press Esc and the panel goes away.

Spotlight does a lot of things. Borma does one of them. There is no web search, no calculator, no file or document search, no plugins, no scripting surface. The search path is wherever applications live on your system. The result list is applications.

Components

Panel

Designing the panel required consideration for what it means to place an input box in the middle of someone’s screen, where anything is possible. It floats above other windows, follows the user across spaces, and appears inside fullscreen apps.

The panel looks great on top of any wallpaper too.

Search

Searching is made fast by maintaining a list of installed apps in memory, generated at launch and updated when apps are installed / removed.

Results are ranked by match quality and by how often you launch each app.

Keyboard Shortcut

To open the panel press ⌘⇧Space. The first time you open it, a small footer appears to show the shortcut.

You can switch that to something else in Borma’s settings.

Note

To use ⌘Space as the shortcut it must be freed from Spotlight first. Open System Settings and go to Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Spotlight and Uncheck Show Spotlight search.

Settings

Settings cover the hotkey, appearance, and launch behavior. You can open Borma’s settings by pressing ⌘, whenever the panel is open.