Fresh guide

Set a global hotkey to open Fresh on Mac

Pick a keystroke that opens Fresh from anywhere on macOS — and what to do if your favourite combo is already taken.

3 min read

You installed Fresh because clicking the menu bar icon is faster than digging through Finder — but reaching for the trackpad to click the menu bar isn’t that fast. A keyboard shortcut you can fire without looking is. Here’s how to set one that works everywhere on macOS, even when Fresh isn’t the active app.

Two paths

The free way (built-in macOS)

macOS has its own keyboard-shortcut system under System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts, but it can’t bind a custom hotkey to “open this menu bar app’s panel.” That kind of global, app-specific shortcut needs the app itself to register it.

Without third-party software, your options are:

  1. Use macOS's built-in Shortcuts app to make a shortcut that runs Fresh, then assign a keyboard shortcut to it. This works but adds a small launch delay.
  2. Drag Fresh's menu bar icon into a position you can hit reliably — not really a hotkey, but the closest native equivalent.

Neither is great. The native shortcuts system was built for menu items inside apps, not for popping up menu bar panels.

The Fresh way

Fresh has built-in global hotkey support, and it’s the first thing you’ll want to set up.

  1. Click the Fresh icon in your menu bar.
  2. Open Settings (or hit ⌘, from the panel).
  3. Find the Hotkey section. The default is ⌘⌥Space.
  4. Click the shortcut field and press the combination you want — ⌘⇧V, ⌃Space, whatever feels natural.
  5. Close Settings. The new hotkey works system-wide immediately.

A few honest notes: macOS only lets one app own a given hotkey at a time. If you try to set Fresh to ⌘Space, Spotlight wins and Fresh’s registration will quietly fail. If your combo doesn’t work after binding, it’s almost always because something else — Spotlight, Raycast, Alfred, an Accessibility shortcut — already grabbed it. Pick something with two modifiers (⌘⌥, ⌃⇧, ⌘⌃) plus a letter or Space, and you’ll almost always be fine.

If you ever want the original back, the Settings panel has a “reset to default” button that puts it back to ⌘⌥Space.

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