swiftui-patterns

A set of practical patterns and examples for building native macOS interfaces with SwiftUI, Apple’s framework for describing app screens and behavior. It covers windows, menus, toolbars, settings, split views, inspectors, menu bar extras, and keyboard controls.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when creating or reorganizing macOS SwiftUI scenes and components, deciding how windows and menus should work, or checking when to use AppKit, macOS’s older UI framework.
Why use it?
It helps you choose suitable macOS interface structures and avoid forcing desktop behavior into patterns meant for other platforms.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/robinebers/openusage/swiftui-patterns
Any agent
npx skills add robinebers/openusage --skill swiftui-patterns
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/robinebers/openusage

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,892 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 89% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00076 $0.02892
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.01446
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00578
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00289

Measured 2d ago against content hash 8b8c4b311737, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

swiftui-patterns scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

89% identical to macos-swiftui-patterns — 92 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.agents/skills/swiftui-patterns/SKILL.md · 210 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 210 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

SwiftUI Patterns

Quick Start

Choose a track based on your goal:

Existing project

  • Identify the feature or scene and the primary interaction model: document, editor, sidebar-detail, utility window, settings, or menu bar extra.
  • Read the nearest existing scene or root view before inventing a new desktop structure.
  • Choose the relevant reference from references/components-index.md.
  • If SwiftUI cannot express the required platform behavior cleanly, use the appkit-interop skill rather than forcing a shaky workaround.

New app scaffolding

  • Choose the scene model first: WindowGroup, Window, Settings, MenuBarExtra, or DocumentGroup.
  • If the app combines a normal main window and a MenuBarExtra, use WindowGroup(..., id:) for the primary window when it should appear at launch. Treat Window(...) as a better fit for auxiliary/on-demand singleton windows; in menu-bar-heavy apps, a Window(...) scene may not present the main window automatically at launch.
  • Before creating the scaffold, check whether the workspace is already inside a git repo with git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree. If not, run git init at the project root so git-backed editor features unlock from the start. Do not initialize a nested repo inside an existing parent checkout.
  • For a new app scaffold, also create one project-local script/build_and_run.sh so the app has a single kill + build + run entrypoint from the start. Use the exact bootstrap contract from build-run-debug and its references/build-script.md file rather than inventing a second variant here.
  • Decide which state is app-wide, scene-scoped, or window-scoped before writing views.
  • Sketch file and module boundaries before writing the full UI. For any non-trivial app, create the folder structure first and split files by responsibility from the start.
  • Use a single Swift file only for tiny throwaway examples or snippets: roughly under 50 lines, one screen, no persistence, no networking/process client, and no reusable models. Anything beyond that should be multi-file immediately.
  • Use system-adaptive colors and materials by default (Color.primary, Color.secondary, semantic foreground styles, .regularMaterial, etc.) so the app follows Light/Dark mode automatically. Do not hardcode white or light backgrounds unless the user explicitly asks for a fixed theme, and do not reach for opaque windowBackgroundColor fills for root panes by default.
  • Pick the references for the first feature surface you need: windowing, commands, split layouts, or settings.

Read the full file on GitHub · 210 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 210 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A 8b8c4b311737

Subscribe to this mod's changes

swiftui-patterns is a skill published in the GitHub repository robinebers/openusage (3,975 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 2,892 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 89% identical to macos-swiftui-patterns, differing in 92 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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