Wildcard apps

Some apps don’t belong to a workspace: a password manager, a music player, a calculator. You want them wherever you are, for a moment. Make them wildcard apps.

When you bring an ordinary app forward, Layout switches to the workspace that holds its window (see Moving windows). A wildcard app works the other way around: its window comes to you.

Make an app wildcard

In Settings › Apps, click Add App… and choose the app. ⓧ makes it an ordinary app again.
Or right-click the app’s icon in the Layout bar and choose Wildcard app.
Or, in the editor, under Windows in this workspace, open a window’s … menu and choose Wildcard app.

The change applies right away. If the app’s windows were in zones, they float where they are.

Call it from any workspace

Bring the app forward the way you usually do: its own shortcut, its menu bar icon, the Dock, or a window picked in the command palette. Layout doesn’t switch workspaces. It brings the app’s window over the workspace you’re in:

It’s the same window every time. Layout doesn’t open another one.
It keeps the position and size it last had on screen.
It floats. It never joins the New windows zone, and you can’t assign it to a zone. If the workspace keeps floating windows inside the margin, it stays inside the margin.

Only the window the app brings to the front comes. If the app shows a panel that Layout doesn’t manage, such as 1Password’s Quick Access, nothing moves.

Where it stays

The window stays in the workspace you called it from. Switch away and it hides with that workspace; come back and it’s there again. Call it from another workspace and it moves there: the first workspace doesn’t show it anymore.

None of this is saved. After Layout quits, no workspace remembers the window.

To go to the window’s workspace instead, pick that workspace: ⌥Tab then the window, or Open next to the window in the editor.

In ⌘ Tab

If you use Layout’s ⌘Tab (see Switchers), your wildcard apps are in it in every workspace, not only in the one that last called them. They come after the workspace’s own windows:

A wildcard app’s window is listed wherever it is. Pick it and it comes to the workspace you’re in, as when you call it.
A wildcard app without a window is listed by its name, with No window open. Pick it and the app opens, or reopens, and its new window floats in the workspace you’re in.

Listed last, they never take the place of the window a quick ⌘Tab goes back to.

To change this, go to Settings › Apps:

Show wildcard apps in ⌘ Tab in every workspace turns it on or off for all of them. On by default.
⌘ Tab everywhere, next to each app, leaves that app out while the others stay. Left out, the app’s window shows in ⌘Tab only in the workspace that last called it.

The macOS app switcher already lists every open app: these settings apply to Layout’s ⌘Tab only.

Layouts ignore wildcard apps

A wildcard app belongs to no layout:

A layout that already includes it, in a zone or as a floating app, keeps it in its settings but ignores it. Launch layout doesn’t open or place it, and the preview doesn’t show it. The editor marks it with ✳ on its zone chip, and “Wildcard: ignored here” in the Floating apps list. Its work context is set aside.
Add app doesn’t offer it.
Save desktop as layout leaves its window out.
The Layout bar shows its icon only while its window is in the workspace.

Make it an ordinary app again to use it in your layouts: nothing was deleted.