Never quit an app by accident again. A tiny native macOS menu-bar app that intercepts ⌘Q (and other danger shortcuts) with a double-press or hold-to-confirm gate.
- 🛡️ Guards ⌘Q out of the box — ⌘W ready with one toggle
- 🎯 Custom danger commands — record any ⌘/⌃/⌥ combo
- 🔁 Three confirmation modes — press twice, hold, or either
- ⏱️ Adjustable timing — hold 0.5–5s, double-press window 0.5–3s
- 💬 Native HUD overlay — tells you what's happening and which app is affected
- 🚀 Launch at login — enable from settings
- 🪶 Super light — single binary, pure AppKit + SwiftUI, zero deps, no dock icon
- macOS 13 Ventura or later
- Xcode command-line tools (to build from source)
SlowQ intercepts keystrokes via a CGEvent tap, which requires Accessibility access.
- Launch SlowQ — you'll get a system prompt
- Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility
- Enable SlowQ
No relaunch needed — the guard activates the moment permission is granted. Until then, the menu bar shows a "Grant Accessibility Access…" shortcut.
⚠️ Rebuilding re-signs the binary, which can invalidate the grant. If ⌘Q stops working after a rebuild, remove and re-add SlowQ in the Accessibility list (or runtccutil reset Accessibility com.slowq.SlowQ).
Open Settings… from the menu bar icon:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Enable SlowQ | Master switch |
| Confirm by | Press twice / Hold / Either |
| Hold duration | How long to hold before it fires |
| Second press within | Time window between presses |
| Launch at login | Register as a login item |
| Danger Commands | Toggle ⌘Q/⌘W, add/remove custom shortcuts |
SlowQ installs a filtering CGEvent tap at the head of the session event queue. When a guarded shortcut is pressed, the event is swallowed before the frontmost app sees it, and a confirmation state starts. On the second press (or when the hold threshold is reached), SlowQ re-posts the original shortcut as a synthetic event tagged with a private marker, which the tap recognizes and passes through untouched.
Key design decisions:
- Only exact modifier matches — ⌘⇧Q (log out) is never caught by the plain ⌘Q guard
- Character-based matching — ⌘Q works on non-US keyboard layouts
- SlowQ never guards itself, and skips plain ⌘Q in Finder (which has no Quit)
🤝 Contributing — Bug reports, ideas, and PRs welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md before opening one.
🔒 Security — Found something sketchy? Report it privately via SECURITY.md.
📄 License — MIT, do whatever you want with it. See LICENSE.