Way to automate hide/show Perspectives Bar on macOS?

Automation OmniFocus Automation
1

I see properties to hide/show the sidebar and inspector of a document window in OmniFocus automation. Is there a way to hide and show the Perspectives Bar?

I am trying to write a plug-in that:

  1. Opens the currently selected project/task in a new window
  2. Focus on the project
  3. Hide the sidebar
  4. Hide the perspectives bar
  5. Resize the window to be narrower

I have 1 - 3 working fine.

Are items 4 and 5 even possible with Omni Automation?

Is there a way to make OmniFocus more drag and drop Friendly in 2026
2

From what I’ve analyzed in the API that’s currently not possible. There’s only a keyboard shortcut.

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3

That was what I found as well. I was hoping that maybe I had missed something.

4

On my Mac, I used keyboard maestro to hide the sidebar and then do all the other stuff.

Or have KM run your shortcut, hide the sidebar with KM, then run a second shortcut to finish.

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5

Other Task Mgmt applications that I have used were much more orientated to drag and drop. OmniFocus with the inspector and the data entry required seems much more like an IBM Mainframe app.

I want to open up four windows, one just showing the projects, one just showing the forecast or maybe calendar, one showing tags and then one that is full screen showing the inbox or any other project I wanted to go into.

That way instead of having to go to the Inspector I could just drag the task to the right project and tag and even assign it a date by dragging and dropping.

Unfortunately when you just try to show those areas you can’t shrink the window down to just get the individual attribute. For example if I just wanted to see one Column with all the projects. It would be great if how many focus mirrored what Finder does in the column view so that when you just clicked on the project it would show what is contained there.

Maybe I’m missing something is there a way to do that in version 4

I would just like to see the second column in the first three windows

CleanShot 2026-03-08 at 15.32.00
CleanShot 2026-03-08 at 15.32.001920Ă—880 187 KB

6

No, the second column in each view is hidable, but the third column isn’t, which makes sense as you would tend to be working in the third column rather than the second.

You can drag and drop as you are though.

7

Just to defend my platform’s honour: IBM mainframe apps come in all shapes and sizes.

I think you mean “character mode”.

However, I find OmniFocus extremely usable.

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