Tap your Mac.
It listens.
Thump turns a tap on the side of your MacBook into anything — play music, launch apps, run shortcuts. No extra hardware. It just feels the tap.
Free · macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon
one tap away
Try a tap right here
Click the palm rest the way you'd tap your MacBook — one, two, or three times. Then try a key: Thump ignores taps while you type.
Live detection
Tap the palm rest to fire a gesture.
- ×1Play / Pause
- ×2Mission Control
- ×3Screenshot
In the app, every gesture is yours to reassign.
It feels the tap, not hears it.
No microphone, no camera, no accessory. Just the accelerometer already inside your Mac, read on-device.
- 01
You tap the chassis
Beside the trackpad, on the palm rest, the lid — anywhere on the aluminium. A normal, gentle tap.
- 02
The sensor feels it
Every Apple Silicon MacBook hides a motion sensor. Your tap sends a sharp vibration spike through the whole body, and Thump reads it in real time.
- 03
Your action runs
Thump groups spikes into single, double, and triple taps — filtering out typing and desk bumps — then fires whatever you mapped.
Small app. Big reach.
Thump lives in your menu bar and turns three simple gestures into control over your whole Mac.
Works anywhere on the chassis
Palm rest, beside the trackpad, the deck, the lid. There is no button to find — the whole laptop is the button.
Private by design
No microphone, no camera. Taps are read from the motion sensor entirely on-device — sensor data never leaves your Mac.
A tap for everything
Media, volume, apps, Shortcuts, screenshots, Mission Control, and more.
Make it yours
Map single, double, and triple taps to anything you like.
Apple Silicon native
Built for the M-series sensor. Featherweight, and it sips power in the background.
A setup you will actually enjoy
Thump tunes its sensitivity with a playful onboarding — keep a ball in the air with your taps — so it is dialled in before you do a thing.
Out of your way
Lives in the menu bar with snooze, a live signal view, and one-tap testing. No Dock clutter.
Questions, answered.
The things everyone asks before trusting an app that can feel their laptop.
Will it work on my Mac?
Thump needs a MacBook with Apple Silicon (M1 or later) — the tap sensor is the motion sensor built into those machines. Intel MacBooks and desktop Macs (mini, Studio, iMac) don't have it, so Thump can't run there. Any recent macOS (Sonoma or later) is fine.
Does it listen through the microphone?
No. Thump never touches the microphone or camera. It reads the accelerometer — it feels the vibration of your tap through the chassis, it doesn't hear it. Sensor data is processed in memory, on-device, and never recorded or transmitted.
Won't typing set it off?
Typing does vibrate the chassis, so Thump watches for keystrokes and ignores everything the sensor feels while you type (and shortly after). Detection is also tuned to the sharp spike-and-decay signature of a deliberate tap, so ordinary desk bumps and laptop handling are filtered out. A sensitivity dial lets you make it stricter or looser.
Why does it need Input Monitoring and Accessibility permissions?
macOS gates the motion sensor behind the Input Monitoring permission — that's the only way to read it. Thump also uses it to know that a key was pressed (never which one) for typing suppression. Accessibility is only needed if you map gestures to media keys like play/pause or volume, because pressing those keys on your behalf requires it.
Does it drain the battery?
The sensor is already running — macOS uses it for things like sudden-motion detection. Thump just reads the stream and does a tiny amount of math per sample, which rounds to a negligible slice of CPU. It's a menu bar app designed to be left on all day.
Is it on the App Store?
No. The sensor Thump reads isn't available to sandboxed App Store apps, so Thump is distributed directly — signed, notarized by Apple, and kept current with built-in updates.
How much does it cost?
Thump is free.
Give your Mac a tap.
Download Thump and map your first gesture in under a minute.