How to get the next recently accessed window or app?

[unphased]

I am making a neovim/neovide session picker using hs.chooser. This situation arises in many situations however.

I am attempting to contextually streamline multiple common behaviors into a single hotkey trigger:

• opening a picker to choose from a list of open or closed editor sessions
• focusing an open editor if one exists and it's not currently focused

The problem arises with the 2nd requirement. If there is more than one, bringing up a chooser would be reasonable. But, i want to streamline it one step further. I want to focus the most recently used open editor. The intended UX would be if I still want a chooser in such a situation i may simply hit the hotkey twice to bring it up.

My understanding of the standard way to figure out the most recently active windows/apps with HS is to use a window watcher/filter or something, and continually keep track in a data structure in the background whatever metadata is needed to whatever level of detail needed. That is fine, but I wonder if there are any simpler ways that we can query without managing our own state for

• most recently accessed app
• most recently accessed window in a given app

etc.

Failing that, it occurs to me that we could with a lot of "extraneous" UI manipulation I would be able to look at one stage of "previous" by hiding the active window; the OS at this point would reveal what would have been the previous window or app (i suppose it would depend on whether stage manager is in use) as a result of hiding the current one, and then I could proceed from there. That won't get me 100% of the way there (as it may well not be the editor i'm interested in) but the idea illustrates that some amount of state could be extracted.

[unphased]

window.orderedWindows looks like probably my ticket for this one to avoiding tracking my own metadata via window filters. Credit to GPT-4o this time for that tip.