One Switch on Mac: how to set it up

One Switch is installed, the panel opens, and a row of toggles is sitting there waiting to be chosen from. Or worse, a toggle has been clicked and nothing happened, because a permission dialog is standing between the click and the result.

Setup for this app comes down to four decisions: which switches appear, what the menu bar icon does, whether keyboard shortcuts get assigned, and how many system permissions get granted. Everything below was verified against the shipping application bundle on 10 September 2026.

First launch, and the one thing that must be chosen

The welcome sequence walks through the headline switches: Hide Desktop Icons, Dark Mode, Keep Awake, Screen Saver, and Headphones Connect. It ends on a customisation screen.

The part worth knowing is that the app has a defined empty state. If no switch is selected, it shows a message asking for at least one switch to be picked before it can start. An icon that opens onto nothing is not a bug, it is the empty state.

Language is the other first launch choice. The app ships localised into twelve languages and exposes a Languages control in the General tab, independent of the system language. That is useful for anyone who wants an English interface on a Japanese system, or the reverse, so screenshots in documentation match what is on screen.

Two structural facts shape the rest of setup. The app runs as a menu bar only agent with no Dock icon, so the menu bar is the only evidence it is running. And it requires macOS Monterey (12) or higher, which the shipping bundle confirms as a hard minimum of 12.0.

Twenty six switches, nine of them on by default

The Customize tab handles the roster. Switches are added, removed, and reordered by drag and drop, and there are 26 of them in total.

Nine are enabled on a fresh install: Hide Desktop Icons, Dark Mode, Keep Awake, Screen Saver, Headphones Connect, Do Not Disturb, Night Shift, True Tone, and Screen Clean.

The other seventeen sit out of the way until added: Stage Manager, Hide Widgets, Mute Microphone, Play Music, Show Hidden Files, Display Sleep, Screen Resolution, Lock Keyboard, Lock Screen, Xcode Cache Clean, Empty Trash, Eject Disk, Empty Clipboard, Hide Windows, Hide Dock, Low Power Mode, and Energy Mode.

A useful filter for trimming the list: anything reachable in two clicks from Control Center can probably go. Dark Mode, Do Not Disturb, and Night Shift are all already there. What has no cheap equivalent is the second group. Clearing the clipboard, locking just the keyboard so the screen can be wiped, toggling hidden files, wiping Xcode derived data, and forcing a specific resolution are all multi step operations otherwise.

Ordering matters more than it looks. The dashboard reads top to bottom, so putting the most used switch first shortens every interaction with the panel by one glance.

Each switch asks for something different

Permissions are where setup usually stalls, and the reason it feels arbitrary is that the switches do not share a single requirement. They fall into distinct groups.

Requirement	Switches that need it	Where to grant it
Automation over System Events	Dark Mode, Hide Dock	Privacy and Security, Automation
Automation over Finder	Empty Trash	Privacy and Security, Automation
Automation over Spotify or Music	Play Music	Privacy and Security, Automation
Bluetooth	Headphones Connect	Privacy and Security, Bluetooth
Location Services	Dark Mode on a sunrise to sunset schedule	Privacy and Security, Location Services
Administrator password	Low Power Mode, Energy Mode	The helper install prompt on first use

When an automation permission is missing, the app says the target app requires the automation feature and offers a button that opens System Settings. Until that is granted, the switch clicks and nothing changes. Almost every report of Dark Mode not toggling traces back to System Events not being approved.

Bluetooth is requested only for the headphone connection switch. If Bluetooth itself is off, the app says so directly rather than failing silently, and once connected it reports left and right earbud battery levels separately.

Location Services applies to one narrow case: the sunrise to sunset variant of the Dark Mode schedule. Setting explicit start and end times instead avoids the location request entirely.

Permission prompts on first launch are common to most menu bar utilities, though the specific ones differ by what the app touches, and the common questions about first run permissions covers the pattern for tools in this category.

The two switches that ask for an administrator password

Low Power Mode and Energy Mode work differently from everything else. Changing macOS power management settings is not something an ordinary user process can do, so the app installs a small privileged helper into the system and routes those two operations through it.

That produces an administrator password prompt the first time either switch is used. On success the app reports that privileged features are now active. On failure it says the helper must be installed before privileged features can be used.

The helper lives outside the app bundle, in the system. Dragging the app to the Trash later will not remove it or its launch configuration. Anyone who has no use for the two power switches can leave them out of the Customize tab, in which case the helper is never installed and the password prompt never appears.

The General tab, which is short but decides three things

The General tab holds the settings that are not switches, and there are only a handful of them. Each one is a decision that is easier to make now than to revisit.

Menubar Icon controls what the app puts in the bar. This is the setting that matters most on a crowded row, because it determines how much horizontal space the app claims for itself before any switch is even used.

Start at Login determines whether the app comes back after a restart. Turning it on registers a small launcher that ships inside the application bundle, which is what then appears in the Login Items list in macOS General settings. A menu bar utility that has to be launched manually every morning tends to stop being used within a fortnight, so this is usually on, but it is worth knowing what the entry in Login Items actually is.

Updates covers automatic update checking. The app carries a standard update framework rather than distributing through the App Store, and a Check for Updates command is available directly from the menu.

Languages sets the interface language independently of the system, across the twelve localisations shipped.

Alongside those sit Send Feedback, which is the documented support route together with the developer's presence on X and Reddit, and a version display. The build checked for this article reported 1.35.4, distributed as a universal binary covering both Intel and Apple Silicon and carrying Apple notarisation.

Keyboard shortcuts, and why they change the menu bar question

The Shortcuts tab records a key combination per switch. The stated purpose is exactly that: recording shortcuts so switches can be toggled from the keyboard.

Conflicts are handled rather than ignored. Entering a combination that another app already claims produces a warning naming the app holding it. Combinations built on Control plus Option tend to survive because macOS itself uses them less.

The switches worth binding are the ones pressed on a schedule rather than occasionally. Mute Microphone, Keep Awake, and Hide Desktop Icons all get pressed around meetings and screen shares, several times a day.

There is a second order effect. Once the frequently used switches all have shortcuts, the reason to keep the panel one click away weakens, and the menu bar slot it occupies becomes negotiable. That is a genuine option on a crowded bar, and it is worth reading against how a menu bar organizer handles the same slot, which hides icons behind a divider and brings them back on demand instead.

Switches with more than two states

Several switches open a submenu rather than flipping on and off, and missing that hides most of their usefulness.

Keep Awake accepts a duration. The published options are 5 minutes, 25 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 5 hours, 8 hours, and indefinitely. A separate option keeps the Mac awake with the lid closed, and turning it on triggers a warning to stay plugged in, since a machine kept awake on battery will eventually shut down hard.

Dark Mode has three modes: manual, a schedule with explicit from and to times, and automatic switching from sunrise to sunset.

Do Not Disturb takes a duration or runs indefinitely, and tells you when it will turn itself off.

Eject Disk has an exclusion list. Volumes added to it are skipped when the switch fires, which is the difference between a useful one click eject and accidentally unmounting an always connected backup drive every time.

Screen Resolution offers a HiDPI only filter, which cuts a long resolution list down to the entries worth choosing.

Screen Clean is worth calling out because it behaves unlike anything else in the list. It blacks the display and, according to the app's own labelling, locks the keyboard at the same time, with a click to exit. That combination is the point: wiping a screen with an unlocked keyboard underneath is how stray keystrokes end up in documents.

Headphones Connect is also more informative than a plain toggle. It reports connecting and disconnecting states rather than jumping straight to connected, and it will say a device was not found or did not respond rather than failing silently. When Bluetooth is switched off entirely, it says that instead.

What the switches actually change underneath

One thing to understand before configuring anything: most of these switches are not adding features, they are flipping settings macOS already has. Hide Desktop Icons, Show Hidden Files, Stage Manager, Hide Widgets, Do Not Disturb, and Low Power Mode all correspond to state the system maintains on its own.

Two consequences follow. The first is that changes made here show up everywhere else in the system, not just inside this app, which is what makes the switches genuinely useful rather than cosmetic.

The second is that whatever state a switch is left in persists independently of the app. Quitting the app does not restore desktop icons that were hidden. Neither does deleting it. That is not a defect, it is the direct result of the switches operating on real system settings, but it does mean the tidy habit is to return a switch to its normal position when finished with it rather than leaving it flipped.

Keep Awake is the exception that proves the rule, because it holds a live assertion rather than writing a setting. Quit the app and the Mac resumes sleeping normally. The duration options exist precisely because an indefinite hold is the kind of thing that gets forgotten.

What to change first

Open the Customize tab and remove every switch that Control Center already covers, then confirm the automation permission for System Events so Dark Mode actually responds. If Low Power Mode is not needed, leave it out and skip the administrator prompt entirely. If the icon still cannot find room on the bar, the crowding is the real problem rather than this app's settings, and Koffret is one place to start on that.