Finicky is a macOS application that allows you to set up rules that decide which browser is opened for every link or url. With Finicky as your default browser, you can tell it to open Facebook or Reddit in one browser, and Trello or LinkedIn in another.

• Decide what urls to open in what browser or app
• Edit urls before opening them
• Complete control over configuration using JavaScript

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Example configuration
• Documentation
• Configuration tips
• Alternatives
• Building Finicky from source
• Current status of Finicky development
• Issues
  • Bugs
  • Feature Requests
  • Questions
• License

Installation

1. Installation alternatives:

• Download the latest release, unzip and put Finicky.app in your application folder.
• Install with homebrew-cask: brew install --cask finicky.

2. Create a file called .finicky.js with configuration
   (examples) in your home directory OR generate a basic configuration with Finicky Kickstart

3. Start Finicky. Please allow it to be set as the default browser.

4. And you’re done. All links clicked that would have opened your browser are now first handled by Finicky.

Example configuration

// ~/.finicky.js

module.exports = {
  defaultBrowser: "Google Chrome",
  rewrite: [
    {
      // Redirect all urls to use https
      match: ({ url }) => url.protocol === "http",
      url: { protocol: "https" }
    }
  ],
  handlers: [
    {
      // Open apple.com and example.com urls in Safari
      match: finicky.matchHostnames(["apple.com", "example.com"]),
      browser: "Safari"
    },
    {
      // Open any url that includes the string "workplace" in Firefox
      match: /workplace/,
      browser: "Firefox"
    },
    {
      // Open google.com and *.google.com urls in Google Chrome
      match: [
        "google.com/*", // match google.com urls
        "*.google.com/*", // match google.com subdomains
      ],
      browser: "Google Chrome"
    }
  ]
};

See the documentation for all the features Finicky supports.

Documentation

Finicky has extensive support for matching, rewriting and starting browsers or other application that handle urls. See the wiki for the full configuration documentation explaining all available, APIs and options as well as detail information on how to match on urls.

Configuration tips

See the wiki page for other configuration tips by users of Finicky.

Alternatives

If you are looking for something that lets you pick the browser to activate in a graphical interface, check out Browserosaurus by Will Stone, an open source browser prompter for macOS. It works really well together with Finicky!

Building Finicky from source

If you’d like to build Finicky from source, you can do so by installing Xcode, Xcode Command Line Tools, and yarn, and then running the following:

# build the source
make

# run the compiled app
make run

Current status of Finicky development

I don’t have time to work on Finicky actively, and that has been the case for several years. I still use it every day and it works really well for my use cases. When I have time I try to respond to support requests on twitter and github.

Don’t expect any work on features, new releases, or even bug fixes on my part at this point. Unless things change a lot in my personal or professional life I won’t have time to work on Finicky for the forseeable future.

Looking for co-maintainers

Do you want to help out with the development of Finicky? My time to spend to work on Finicky is very limited, and my limited experience with Swift and MacOS I feel is holding it back. If you are experienced in Swift and MacOS development and this sounds interesting to you please reach out to me, preferably on Twitter.

Issues

Bugs

Please file an issue for bugs, missing documentation, or unexpected behavior.

See Bugs

Feature Requests

Please file an issue to suggest new features. Vote on feature requests by adding
a 👍.

See Feature Requests

Questions

Have any other questions or need help? Please feel free to reach out to me on Mastodon or Twitter.

License

MIT