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KillSwitch

KillSwitch is a lightweight macOS menu bar utility for seeing memory pressure and quickly quitting heavy apps.

Built in Swift and SwiftUI, KillSwitch gives you a fast, native way to spot memory-heavy apps and gracefully quit them without opening Activity Monitor.

KillSwitch popover

KillSwitch also includes a built-in Sparkle updater for silent background checks and standard macOS update prompts.

What it does

  • Shows current unified memory usage at a glance
  • Lists the top memory-using user apps
  • Lets you request a normal app quit without skipping save prompts
  • Includes an in-app updater with background update checks
  • Stays in the menu bar instead of becoming another window-heavy dashboard

Current status

The app shell is up and running locally with:

  • menu bar extra and popover UI
  • live memory snapshot
  • top applications list
  • graceful quit buttons
  • settings window
  • local build/run script
  • Sparkle-based in-app update checks with silent background checking

Updates

KillSwitch ships with a Sparkle-based in-app updater. Once a user is on a current release, the app can check for updates in the background and present the standard macOS install-and-relaunch flow when a new version is available.

Users on older pre-updater builds need one manual upgrade through Homebrew or the latest GitHub Release before in-app updating takes over.

Requirements

  • macOS 14 or newer
  • Full Xcode installed

KillSwitch prefers the full Xcode toolchain. The local run script auto-detects Xcode in:

  • /Applications/Xcode.app
  • /Volumes/SSD/Applications/Xcode.app

If your Xcode install lives somewhere else, set DEVELOPER_DIR before building.

Run locally

git clone https://github.com/<owner>/KillSwitch.git
cd KillSwitch
./script/build_and_run.sh

Useful variants:

./script/build_and_run.sh --verify
./script/build_and_run.sh --logs
./script/build_and_run.sh --debug

Project layout

Sources/KillSwitch/
├── App/
├── Models/
├── Services/
├── ViewModels/
├── Views/
└── Support/

Supporting scripts live in script/, and the product spec lives in killswitch_prd.md.

Release path

The repo includes GitHub Actions for:

  • CI builds on macOS
  • Packaging a release .app into a zip artifact
  • Optional signing and notarization when Apple secrets are present
  • Generating and publishing a Sparkle appcast.xml feed for in-app updates
  • Generating a Homebrew cask file from the release artifact checksum
  • Optionally publishing that cask into a Homebrew tap when tap secrets are present

See docs/release.md for the release and Homebrew flow.

Homebrew cask

The intended distribution path is:

  1. Ship a tagged GitHub Release with KillSwitch.zip
  2. Generate the matching killswitch.rb cask file from that artifact
  3. Optionally publish that cask into your tap automatically from GitHub Actions
  4. Install with brew install --cask <tap>/killswitch

The release workflow generates the cask file for you once the repo slug and release artifact exist. If HOMEBREW_TAP_REPOSITORY and HOMEBREW_TAP_GITHUB_TOKEN are configured in GitHub Actions secrets, it will also commit the generated cask into that tap.

Open questions before public release

  • Choose the public GitHub repo slug
  • Choose the Homebrew tap repository slug
  • Choose an open-source license
  • Finalize signing and notarization secrets for release builds