A tiny, fast macOS menu bar app that fixes the small, annoying details of how the Mac works — Finder keyboard behaviour, a couple of context-menu additions, and a solid-black menu bar. No dock icon; it lives in the menu bar.
Click the menu bar icon for Settings and Quit. Each tweak is an independent toggle you turn on as you like; turning NittyGritty off reverts everything.
Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later.
- Finder — Open with Enter — press Enter to open the selected file or folder (like double-click) instead of renaming it, when exactly one item is selected. The rename action moves to a configurable shortcut (default ⌃⌘R).
- Finder — Cut / Paste with Cmd — cut files with ⌘X and paste (move) them with ⌘V, like every other app.
- Finder — Backspace to go up — press Backspace to jump to the enclosing folder, like Back in Windows Explorer. (Ignored while renaming or searching.)
- Finder — Copy Path — adds a "Copy Path" item to the right-click menu.
- Finder — Open in Terminal — adds an "Open in Terminal" item when you right-click a folder's empty background, using the terminal app of your choice.
- Menu Bar — Black background — paints the menu bar solid black on every display (handy for hiding the notch), restoring your wallpaper when turned off.
- General — Launch at login, hide the menu-bar icon, and Check for Updates.
- Lightweight — native Swift + SwiftUI/AppKit, no third-party dependencies.
The keyboard tweaks need Accessibility permission, and the context-menu items are provided by a bundled Finder extension — see setup below.
- Download
NittyGritty.zipfrom the latest release. - Unzip and drag NittyGritty.app into
/Applications. - Launch it. A hex-nut icon appears in your menu bar.
First-run setup (only what you need for the features you want):
- Keyboard tweaks — Settings → Finder → Grant…, or System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility, and enable NittyGritty.
- Context-menu items — Settings → Finder → Open…, then enable NittyGritty Finder under System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions → Finder Extensions.
This build is not notarized (that requires a paid Apple Developer account), so Gatekeeper warns on first launch. To open it anyway (only needed once per version):
- Right-click
NittyGritty.app→ Open → Open in the dialog, or - Open it once, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click Open Anyway.
Alternatively, strip the quarantine flag in Terminal:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/NittyGritty.app"Requires Xcode 26+ (the icon is a Liquid Glass .icon compiled with actool) and XcodeGen (brew install xcodegen).
makeThis generates the Xcode project, builds, ad-hoc signs (needed so the event tap and Finder extension work), and leaves the finished app at dist/NittyGritty.app. Drag it into /Applications to use it.
Other targets: make build (compile only, keeps the build/ scratch for incremental dev), make reset (quit a running copy), make clean (remove build/, dist/, and the generated project).
The Finder extension only registers with Finder when the app is in
/Applications, so movedist/NittyGritty.appthere before enabling the context-menu items.
Settings → Check for Updates queries the GitHub Releases page and tells you when a newer version exists. No telemetry, no account — just a single request to the public GitHub API.