KnockSense
Turn knocks on your MacBook into shortcuts
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KnockSense turns knocks on your MacBook into actions. Double-knock to play music, triple-knock for Mission Control, knock the lid to lock the screen. Any pattern can open apps, websites, Shortcuts or take screenshots. It works during loud movies and ignores doors, claps and footsteps. Plus Laptop Guard: arm it before stepping away, and if someone touches your Mac it takes a photo, sounds a siren and alerts your phone. Free, private, lives in your menu bar.
PH · launched Nov 12, 2026 · 1 upvote (top 65%) · 0 views
Niche: macos system utilities · 448 launches, 37 in the last 7 days ▼ -8% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Workflow automation
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Commercial product
- Mac
- Productivity
- GitHub
- Menu Bar Apps
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 448 launches in macos system utilities →
Could you build this?
Partial The UI and action mapping are simple, but reliably detecting knock patterns from the MacBook's motion sensor while rejecting doors, claps and footsteps is a signal-processing problem, and recent Macs don't expose that sensor cleanly.
What it would actually take: Read the lid/chassis accelerometer through IOKit or a helper daemon, then run onboard signal processing: filtering, onset detection, and a classifier to separate knock patterns from ambient noise. The hard part is the sensor access and the noise-rejection tuning, which needs someone comfortable with low-level macOS and DSP. The action layer (Shortcuts, AppleScript, screenshots) is standard.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 899 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #522 of 900 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 361 days after the earliest competitor.
- Knock · ph · 2026-03-16 · 168 upvotes · similarity 0.82
- Knock · ph · 2026-10-26 · 73 upvotes · similarity 0.80
- mactap · ph · 2026-09-10 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.68
- KnockKnock · ph · 2026-10-16 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.67
- Crack · hn · 2026-03-22 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Macbook Duo - Fold like iPhone Duo · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Knucklebop · ph · 2026-10-31 · 100 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Kleanly · ph · 2026-09-26 · 109 upvotes · similarity 0.52
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