Open Any Browser Profile With a Keyboard Shortcut on macOS

There are two ways to open a browser profile, and both involve more steps than they should. You can hunt through the browser's profile menu, click the one you want, and wait for a window to appear. Or you can click a link and route it to the right profile after the fact. Either way, your hand leaves the keyboard and you spend a few seconds on something you do dozens of times a day.

Burly adds a third way: a single global keyboard shortcut that opens any profile directly, from anywhere on your Mac, straight to a fresh tab. No link required, no picker, no menu. You think "work browser" and it is in front of you before you have finished the thought. That shortcut lives in the same link router that already handles clicked links, so you are not installing a second launcher just for profiles.

How are the profile shortcuts built?

Every Burly hotkey is a shared prefix plus a single key. The prefix is one modifier combo you press for all of them; the key is what picks the profile. So if your Work profile is on 1 and Personal is on 2, the prefix plus 1 opens Work and the prefix plus 2 opens Personal. One muscle-memory chord, a different finger for each profile.

You do not have to set any of this up. Burly auto-assigns a key to each profile in order, 1 through 9 and then the letters A through Z, so the shortcuts work the moment you install it. If you want a specific profile on a specific key, click its key in Settings and press the one you want. A solid keycap means you chose it; a dashed one is the auto-assigned default.

Why is the default prefix Hyper?

The default prefix is the Hyper combo, Control-Option-Shift-Command, all four modifiers at once. It looks like a lot, but that is the point: no part of macOS and almost no app claims it, so your profile shortcuts never collide with something else. Plain Control plus a digit is already Mission Control's "switch to Desktop N," Command plus a digit switches tabs, and the other single modifiers just type characters. Hyper sidesteps all of it.

If a four-finger chord is more than you want, Settings offers shorter presets, Control-Option-Command, Control-Option-Shift, or Option-Command. They are all curated to avoid the system shortcuts that single modifiers would stomp on, so whichever you pick stays conflict-free.

Which shortcut should you memorize first?

There is a reserved key worth learning before any other: the prefix plus 0 always opens your most recently used destination. It is not tied to a particular profile, it follows wherever you were last. When you spend a day ping-ponging between two profiles, that single keystroke becomes the one your hand reaches for automatically.

The same 0 works inside the picker too. When a link does bring up the profile picker, pressing 0 there sends it to the most recent destination, so the reserved key behaves the same whether you are launching a profile cold or routing a link.

Why isn't my profile hotkey working?

Burly registers its shortcuts with the same system hotkey service macOS has offered for decades. That service needs no Accessibility permission, works while Burly sits quietly in the menu bar, and swallows the keystroke so the app in front never sees it. When a shortcut does nothing, it is almost always one of these:

1. Global hotkeys are turned off. They are on by default, but check the Global Hotkeys section of Burly's Settings if someone switched them off.
2. Another app already owns that exact combination. macOS gives a global shortcut to whichever app registers it first, and Burly skips a combo that is taken rather than fighting for it. The other profiles keep working. Pick a different key for that profile, or switch to another prefix in Settings.
3. Two profiles ended up on the same key. Only the first one registers. Look for the duplicate in Settings and give one of them a new key.
4. The profile is a Safari profile and the shortcut opens Safari but not the right profile. Safari offers no public way to open a specific profile, so Burly presses Safari's own New Window menu item for that profile. That needs Accessibility permission for Burly, and Safari has to be running. The Help page walks through granting it.
5. Burly is not running. The shortcuts belong to Burly, so they stop when it quits. Turning on Launch Burly at login, under System in Settings, keeps them available after a restart.

How does this compare with macOS keyboard shortcuts?

You can get partway there without Burly. System Settings, Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, App Shortcuts lets you bind a key to any menu item by its exact title, so a shortcut for Safari's "New Work Window" works, but only while Safari is the frontmost app. Shortcuts and automation tools can launch Chrome with a profile directory from a shell command, which works across apps but means writing and maintaining one script per profile.

Burly's hotkeys cover the gap between those two: one consistent chord that works from any app, for every browser at once, and that updates on its own when you add or rename a profile. If you only ever use one Safari profile from inside Safari, the built-in App Shortcuts setting is enough. If you jump between profiles across browsers all day, a single global scheme is simpler to live with.

Is a hotkey faster than switching profiles by hand?

The link picker is what most people meet first, and it is the right tool when a link could plausibly belong to more than one profile. But the profiles you actually live in, the work browser, the personal browser, are not ambiguous. You always know where they go. For those, the fastest interface is no interface: a keystroke that opens the exact profile you meant, no question asked.

Global hotkeys are on by default, so this is already working the moment Burly is installed. Learn the prefix, learn the two or three keys for the profiles you use most, and opening the right browser context stops being a task you do and becomes something your hands do for you.