Profile Switcher — Hermes Desktop plugin

A macOS-style quick switcher for Hermes profiles, in the Hermes Desktop app.

Hermes already ships positional profile hotkeys (⌘1…⌘9 for the first nine profiles, ⌘⌥1…⌘⌥9 for the rest) — but there is no way to browse your profiles and jump to one, and no chord at all for "switch profile". This plugin adds that missing surface: one key opens a panel of every profile, you move the highlight, and you land in the one you pick.

What it does

Alt+Tab for profiles. Hold ⌃⌥ and tap Tab to cycle through your profiles, then let go to land on the highlighted one — the same hold-tap-release rhythm as the OS app switcher.

Why not literal Alt+Tab? The operating system owns Alt+Tab (and Win+Tab, and ⌘Tab). Those keystrokes are consumed by the window manager before any application sees them, so no app — Electron apps included — can bind them. ⌃⌥+Tab is the closest chord the OS leaves to applications, and nothing in Hermes core claims it.
One chord opens the switcher. ⌥⌘P by default (⌃⌥P on Linux/Windows). It is a contributed keybind, so it shows up in the app's own Keybind panel — rebind it, or clear it, like any other shortcut.
Every profile, with context. Each row shows the profile name, the model it runs, how long ago it was last active, and the title of its most recent conversation. A profile with a worker running shows a spinner.
Keyboard-driven. Hold ⌃⌥ and tap Tab (or ↑ ↓) to move, Enter switches, Esc cancels. The first tap moves you off the profile you are already in, exactly like Alt+Tab, so you are switching rather than re-selecting.
A status-bar chip names the active profile and opens the same panel on click — a second, discoverable door for people who never learn the chord.
The switch is a real switch. It goes through the Desktop's own profile path: the target profile's backend is activated, the chrome is scoped onto it, and you land in that profile's most recent conversation (or a fresh draft, if it has none).

Install

From the Hermes plugin catalog (Hermes Desktop → Capabilities → Plugins, search Profile Switcher), or from a terminal:

hermes plugins install profile-switcher

The app copies the desktop half into ~/.hermes/desktop-plugins/ and loads it within a few seconds. Flip the switch in Capabilities → Plugins to enable it — the plugin ships off by default, so it never claims a chord you did not ask for.

To install from this repository directly:

hermes plugins install okyssta/hermes-profile-switcher

Or paste https://github.com/okyssta/hermes-profile-switcher into Hermes Desktop → Capabilities → Plugins → Install from source. The plugin lives at the repository root (plugin.yaml + desktop/plugin.js), which is what both installers scan for.

Settings

Settings → Plugins → Profile Switcher has two toggles: whether each row shows the profile's model, and whether it shows the last conversation title. They are stored per plugin through the SDK's own storage door.

Requirements

Hermes Desktop 0.21.6 or newer (the floor for the floating-pane placement, the contributed-keybind area, and the cross-profile switch this plugin is built on). The plugin is desktop-only — it registers nothing on the agent side, so it does nothing in the CLI or on a messaging platform.

Disclosure

Network calls: none beyond the Hermes gateway the Desktop app is already connected to. The plugin issues one profiles.list read when the switcher opens; it never polls on a timer.
Reads outside its own data: none. It reads the profile roster the gateway already serves to the app's own profile rail.
Shell commands: none.
Long-running background processes: none.
Stored credentials: none. The only persisted state is two booleans in the plugin's own scoped storage.
Telemetry: none.

Layout

plugin.yaml                     ← manifest
__init__.py                     ← the no-op agent half the loader requires
desktop/plugin.js               ← the loadable artifact: plain ESM, built
src/                            ← the TSX source it is built from
  plugin.tsx
  roster.ts                     ← the pure roster helpers (unit-tested)
  sdk.d.ts                      ← ambient types for the plugin SDK
tests/                          ← unit tests + a load-and-register harness

The plugin is at the repository ROOT, not in a subdirectory: the Desktop app's "Install from source" dialog only scans the repo root for plugin.js or desktop/plugin.js, and hermes plugins install <owner>/<repo> resolves the same way.

Build

npm install
npm run build     # esbuild → profile-switcher/desktop/plugin.js
npm run check     # tsc --noEmit
npm test          # unit tests + the load-and-register harness

desktop/plugin.js is committed, so installing from a checkout never needs a build step.

Development notes

The desktop half is plain ESM loaded uncompiled by the app, and the only importable specifiers are @hermes/plugin-sdk, react, and react/jsx-runtime. The build output is checked in, so the repository has no runtime dependency on npm.

The tests/plugin-harness.test.mjs harness stands in for the Electron app on a headless host: it loads the built bundle the way the renderer's loader does, calls register(ctx) against a recording context, and renders every contributed component with React's server renderer. It proves the plugin loads, registers, and renders — it does not prove the real Electron render, the real keybind dispatch, or a live profile switch. Those need the app.

License

MIT

profile-switcher

Screenshots

README