A Back button for your whole Mac

Every browser has a Back button. It’s the most used button on the web. Your Mac, the thing that holds all those browsers and everything else, doesn’t have one.

What “Back” should mean on a Mac

Here’s a normal minute. You’re in a Notion doc. A Slack message pulls you into a thread. The thread links a PR. The PR mentions a dashboard. Now you want to get back to the doc.

⌘Tab gets you to Notion, the app. But which page? Which window? You’re hunting again.

That’s the gap. Your Mac remembers apps. It should remember places. A place is a tab, a doc, a window or a coding session. Back should take you to the place.

Back and Forward, everywhere

With Hopper, press ⌃⌥← from any app and you’re back where you were: that doc, in that window. Press it again to keep going back. ⌃⌥→ undoes a Back.

It works across apps the way a browser works across pages. No switcher to scroll through.

Two flips for the back-and-forth

Most switching is between two things. So there are two gestures for it, both double taps:

• Toggle: double-tap ⌘ to flip between your two most recent apps.
• Toggle Tab: double-tap ⌥ to flip between your two most recent tabs, windows or sessions, even inside one app. Two Chrome tabs, two Claude Code sessions, a doc and its spec.

Writing code against a spec? Double-tap ⌥, read, double-tap again.

Three more ways back

• History (press and release ⌃⌘): every place you visited, newest first. Kept for 30 days by default, or as long as you choose.
• Recently Closed: close a tab by accident and it waits here, ready to reopen in its own browser.
• Now Playing: jump straight to whatever is making sound, like the tab with the video, or Music. If several things are playing, pick from a list.

All of these are on the Hotkeys & Gestures cheat sheet.

Try it

Hopper is for macOS 26 and later. Download it and try it.