Everything Old Habits does, in detail.

The suite

menu bar, switches and preferences

Old Habits is a menu bar app that brings the tools together. Old Habits Explorer, Old Habits Paint and Old Habits Notes are apps of their own, with a Launchpad icon: when you turn one on, the suite installs it in Applications › Old Habits.

One switch per tool

• Each tool has an Enabled switch in its preferences tab, and the Modules submenu in the menu bar turns them on and off without opening anything.
• Out of the box, only Snap is on.
• Show the suite: in the menu bar (default), in the Dock, or both.
• Launch at login: off by default.

Windows or Mac shortcut style

• Shortcut style: Windows (Control), the default, or Mac (Command). Applies to Explorer, Notes and Paint.
• The five universal ones — ⌘A, ⌘C, ⌘X, ⌘V and ⌘Z — keep working alongside the Control version, so your Mac habit doesn’t break. You can extend the ⌘ twins to every command.
• In the Shortcuts tab, any tool shortcut can be re-recorded; the suite warns when it clashes with another one or with a combination reserved by macOS.

Initial setup

On first launch, a four-page assistant walks you through permissions, system settings, default apps and notices. Reopen it anytime with Open initial setup….

Old Habits Explorer

on Windows: File Explorer

A file manager with the look and the keyboard of the Windows 10 and 11 File Explorer. It’s a separate app: Finder is still there.

Window

• Choose between the Command bar (Windows 11) and the Ribbon (Windows 10), with the File, Home, Share and View tabs. The Ribbon collapses with ⌃F1.
• Sidebar tree with Favorites, This Computer, Volumes & Devices, Trash, recent files and folders. It refreshes by itself when a folder changes elsewhere.
• Address bar, Back, Forward, Up and Refresh.
• Tabs and multiple windows.

View

• Eight modes: small, medium, large and extra large icons, List, Details, Tiles and Content.
• Sort and Group by name, dates, type, size and tags.
• Preview pane with file details (photo EXIF, audio and video length, PDF pages), item check boxes, extensions, hidden items and a status bar with free space.
• Optimize this folder for general items, documents, pictures, music or videos.

Files

• Real cut, copy and paste for files, with Keep Both, Ignore or Replace on conflicts.
• Undo and redo file operations.
• Move to, Copy to, New Folder, New text document, Create shortcut, Compress to .zip and Copy as Path.
• Open with, Open in Terminal, Share, Services, Quick Actions and Quick Look with the space bar.
• Images: rotate 90° losslessly in JPEG and Set as desktop background.
• Properties with General (read-only, hidden, default app, size), Details and Customize (folder icon and template) tabs.

Search

• In this folder or across the whole Mac, through the Spotlight index — or with its own scan when hidden and system items must be found.
• Also searches file contents and names inside .zip files, without extracting.

Shortcuts

Old Habits Explorer doesn’t replace Finder and doesn’t become the system’s default folder browser. Extracting .zip files isn’t part of it yet.

Old Habits Paint

on Windows: Paint

A simple image editor with the Ribbon of Paint on Windows 10 and 11.

Tools

• Rectangular, free-form and transparent selection; select all and invert selection.
• Pencil, eraser, fill, color picker, magnifier and text with font, bold, italic, underline and opaque or transparent background.
• Brushes: brush, two calligraphy brushes, airbrush, oil brush, crayon, marker, natural pencil and watercolor.
• 23 shapes — line, curve, polygons, arrows, stars, callouts, heart, lightning — with solid or textured outline and fill.

Colors and image

• Color 1 and Color 2, palette and Edit colors by hue, saturation, luminance or RGB. Custom colors are remembered.
• Crop, Resize Image, Resize canvas, rotate 90° and 180°, flip horizontally and vertically.
• Rulers, gridlines, full screen and zoom.

Files

• Saves as PNG, JPEG and BMP. Also opens TIFF, GIF and HEIC.
• Paste from file, import, print and print preview.
• Up to 200 undo levels (50 by default).
• Can become the default app for PNG, JPEG and BMP — and stop being it, in one click.

Shortcuts

Old Habits Notes

on Windows: Notepad

A plain text editor that behaves like Notepad on Windows 11.

Tabs and session

• Tabs and windows; on launch, Continue the previous session or start a new one.
• Unsaved text is kept automatically as a draft. When closing a tab, it saves quietly or asks — your choice.
• Write to File Live: saves to the file itself as you type, tab by tab.

Editing

• Find and Replace, with match case, whole word, wrap around and replace all.
• Go to a line and Time/Date with F5.
• Word wrap, font, zoom and a status bar with line, column, characters and words.
• Spell checking that only underlines; code and data files are left out.

Encoding and line endings

• Detects UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252 on open.
• Saves as UTF-8, UTF-8 with BOM, UTF-16 and ANSI (Windows-1252).
• LF, CRLF or CR line endings. Encoding and line endings change from the status bar.
• Can become the default app for plain text.

Shortcuts

Drafts are stored as plain text in the app’s support folder, on your Mac — the app tells you so in its preferences.

Windows that snap to edges and layouts, like on Windows 11.

Snapping

• Drag a window to a side and it takes half the screen; to a corner, a quarter; to the top, it maximizes.
• Moving a window to the top by its title bar opens the layouts panel, with six layouts on by default: 50/50, 70/30, half + two quarters, half on top, three columns and four quarters. There are 13 in the catalog.
• New layout…: draw your own zones on a grid of up to 12×8.
• Snap Assist: after you snap a window, the others are suggested for the empty zones.

Groups

• Windows snapped together become a group, which the Groups submenu restores at once.
• Chained actions in groups: minimizing or restoring one window takes the group along, and dragging the divider resizes the neighbors.

Shortcuts

While Snap is on, macOS’s own window tiling is turned off so the two don’t compete for the same gesture. It comes back when you turn Snap off or quit the suite, and the Revert system changes button does it right away.

Alt+Tab window switching. On a Mac keyboard, ⌘ sits exactly where Alt was on a PC keyboard — that’s why the shortcut is ⌘Tab.

• One entry per window, with a thumbnail. Two Safari windows are two entries.
• ⌥Tab switches between apps, for when you want the old Mac behavior. You can turn it off and give ⌥Tab back to the system.
• Releasing the key confirms; Esc cancels; click and hover work too.
• Buttons on thumbnails to close, minimize, maximize and quit the app.
• Include minimized windows and windows of hidden apps, or not; adjustable thumbnail size.
• Windows on another desktop get an other space badge; a Snap group shows up as a single entry.
• All four combinations can be re-recorded.

If the Switcher ever delays your keyboard, it turns itself off so typing never stalls.

Taskbar window previews, on the Mac Dock.

• Hover over a Dock icon and thumbnails of that app’s windows appear. The delay is adjustable (0.3 s by default).
• Click a thumbnail to bring the window forward, or use the buttons to close, minimize and maximize.
• Minimized windows are included (you can turn that off); windows on another desktop get an other space badge.
• Double-clicking the icon of an app that’s already in front minimizes its windows on the current desktop.

The Win+V clipboard history.

• ⌃⌥V opens the panel with what you copied: text, web addresses, images and files.
• Keys 1 to 9 pick an item; ↩ uses the selected one; ⌫ removes it. Filter by text and by type.
• Pin, Paste as plain text and Show source folder.
• Choose what double-click does: paste directly (default), copy, or copy as plain text.
• Drag an image from the history into a folder and it becomes a PNG or JPEG file.
• Keep for 5 min, 15 min, 1 h, 3 h, 24 h or until you quit.

Privacy

• History lives in memory only: it never goes to disk or to logs.
• Whatever password managers mark as concealed is ignored.
• Excluded apps: what you copy in them stays out.
• Clear when the screen locks, Ignore items copied on another device and Clear now.

Permissions

macOS asks for authorization for everything the suite does outside its own window. The Permissions section of the preferences shows the state of each one, with a shortcut to System Settings.

Desktop, Documents and Downloads: macOS itself asks once per folder the first time Explorer opens them.

Privacy

• Old Habits has no networking code: no account, no telemetry, no usage statistics.
• Clipboard history lives in memory only and is gone when you quit (or sooner, if you set it up that way).
• Explorer search is local, through Spotlight or its own scan.
• The only change to system settings is macOS window tiling, turned off while Snap is on and restored when you quit.

Requirements

• macOS 26 or later.
• Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or newer). Intel Macs are not supported.
• Interface in English and Portuguese.
• Signed with Developer ID and notarized by Apple.