I was bored, so I made a macOS app

One highly underrated feature in iOS is the “tap the status bar to scroll to the top”. It is the kind of feature that you take for granted and that it is universally available. However, this is not an OS feature, so when you stumble across and iOS app that don’t support it, for what ever reason, you start to realise how deeply connected it is to your general expectation of the platform.

This feature has yet to pop up on macOS and for good reasons, it does not really translate that well into a keyboard & mouse echosystem. With that said, it is time to contradict myself. I have found myself on multiple occasions just clicking away at the statusbar with the same expectations that I have on iOS, only to be disappointed.

I was under the assumption that I was the only one with this desire, but it so just happens that a dear co-worker of mine mentioned this specific feature just the other day. So I thought to myself, this could easily be a super tiny macOS application that does just that.

This evening I had some spare time, so instead of just sitting around and procrastinating, I thought “hey, I can make this happen”.

Say hello to ToTheTop.

ToTheTop is a small macOS application that adds the same kind of scroll-to-top behavior that you know and love from iOS. The application creates a small clickable area in your status bar located in the top center of your screen covering the status bar. Don’t worry, the area is invisible, just like in iOS. The current width and height is set to 60x22 pixels.

When that area is clicked, the application will then create a keystroke using CGEvent, more specifically a home key event, that will cause the front most application to scroll to the top.

The application is open source and is available on GitHub.

https://github.com/zenangst/ToTheTop

I haven’t gotten around to making a release yet, or to give the application an icon. That might or might not happen later.

Some statistics from the repository (made using cloc)

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Language                   files     blank      comment       code
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Swift                          4        19            1         59
JSON                           1         0            0         58
Markdown                       1         3            0          8
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SUM:                           6        22            1        125
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Enjoy!