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October 3, 2026 · Dorien Herremans

Every App Switch Is a Doorway. With ADHD, I Forget Why I Walked Through.

I opened the terminal to run a script on a CSV file.

Then I realised I didn't remember the exact filename, so I switched to Finder to check. It was there. I pressed Space to look at it, and Quick Look gave me a wall of commas, so I opened it in another app to see it properly. Something looked off, and I started wondering whether this was the old export, so I opened my FTP client to compare it with the version on the server.

About a minute and a half later I was staring at a folder listing in the FTP client with genuinely no idea what I'd come there to do. The script never ran, and the terminal was still sitting in my home directory where I had left it.

If you have ADHD, I suspect you've had some version of that minute. And it turns out there's a name for what happened.

The doorway effect

Most people have walked into the kitchen and immediately forgotten what they went there for. Psychologists call this the doorway effect, and it has actually been studied. In a series of experiments at the University of Notre Dame (Radvansky & Copeland, 2006; Radvansky, Krawietz & Tamplin, 2011), Gabriel Radvansky and his colleagues found that walking through a doorway made people noticeably worse at remembering what they had just been dealing with, compared with walking the same distance within a single room.

The explanation they give, as Radvansky put it in Notre Dame's write-up of the research, is that our brains chop experience up into episodes, and a doorway works as an event boundary. When you cross one, your mind tidies away the previous scene to make room for the new one, and whatever you were planning to do (get the scissors, find the charger) tends to get tidied away along with it.

What I found most interesting is that the effect also appeared when people walked through doorways in a virtual environment on a computer screen. Nobody left their chair. The doorway only had to feel like a transition from one space to another.

To be clear, those studies were about rooms, not apps, so applying them to software is my own leap. But I recognise the feeling. When I switch from the terminal to Finder, everything changes at once: the window, the layout, the controls, even where my eyes go on the screen. It feels a lot like walking into another room, and on a busy day as a developer I do that hundreds of times.

And then there's ADHD

I have inattentive ADHD, which mostly means my thoughts drift off quietly and I often don't notice until I'm somewhere else entirely. But I don't think you need my particular kind of ADHD for this to land. If you have the hyperactive or combined type, the doorway might trip you up differently: the new window is full of new things, something grabs you, and you're off doing that instead. Different route, same result. You arrive somewhere and the original plan has gone.

What ADHD in all its forms tends to share is a struggle with working memory, which shows up consistently in research on both children and adults with ADHD. Working memory is the mental scratchpad that keeps track of what am I doing right now, and why. Everyone loses a few notes off that scratchpad at a doorway. With ADHD, mine seems to lose most of them, most of the time.

That's why, for me, a context switch costs much more than the second it takes to press ⌘-Tab. There's a real chance that by the time I get to the other side, I've already lost the reason I went. Then I either have to rebuild it, or, more often, I get drawn into whatever the new window happens to be showing me.

For years my working day on a Mac was spread across something like this:

  • Terminal to run things
  • Finder to find things
  • A previewer or editor to actually read the Markdown, the CSV, the JSON
  • An FTP, SFTP, or cloud storage client to get to files on a server or in a bucket
  • A git client (or more terminal) to see what had changed

Pretty much every task meant going back and forth between several of those, sometimes many times over, and each of those trips was another doorway.

At some point I accepted that I wasn't going to get better at doorways, and that it would be more realistic to have fewer of them. That idea eventually turned into Iruka, a native macOS file manager that I build. These days it's my main workspace. I have it open all day, every day, and I wanted to share it because it has made a real difference to how scattered my days feel. So, with the obvious disclosure that I'm biased, here is how it deals with each of those doorways.

Doorway 1: the terminal (the big one)

This was the doorway that cost me the most.

You find a folder in Finder, switch to Terminal, and then you have to retype the path to the folder you were looking at a second ago, from memory, one cd at a time. Somewhere around cd ~/projects/client- I'd start thinking about the client, then the email I still owed them, and the folder would be forgotten.

In Iruka, the terminal sits underneath the file browser and follows you around. When you browse to a folder, the shell is already there, so there's no path to retype and no other window to go to.

When I browse to a folder, the terminal underneath is already in it.

On paper this sounds like a minor convenience, but for me it's the difference between going from I want to run this script here straight to running it, versus going from that thought to typing a path and losing the thought halfway.

There are a few details that help me stay on track:

  • It doesn't get in your way. If something is running, like a build, an editor, a REPL, or an AI agent, Iruka holds back the cd and shows "Sync paused — terminal is busy". Once the command finishes, the terminal catches up to wherever you've browsed in the meantime, so you can keep clicking around while you wait without breaking anything.
  • It also works in the other direction. If you've cd'd somewhere in the shell yourself, one button brings the file browser to the terminal's folder. It doesn't matter which side you wandered off with, the other one can catch up.
  • You can stay on the keyboard. ⌘⌥T switches focus between the browser and the terminal, and F4 hides the terminal without stopping whatever is running in it.

This became even more useful once AI coding agents started living in the terminal. I browse to a folder, type claude, and the agent starts in exactly the folder I'm looking at. I've written about that workflow separately.

Doorway 2: "let me just open that in something that can read it"

A lot of what's on my disk is text: Markdown notes, CSV exports, JSON, HTML reports, source code. Finder's Quick Look shows most of it as raw text, full of asterisks, pound signs and commas.

So I used to spot a file, open it in a separate app to read it properly, and by the time that app had started up and arranged its windows, I'd walked through another doorway.

Iruka renders these files right next to the file list:

  • Markdown as a properly formatted document, with headings, tables and code blocks
  • CSV as a scrollable grid with a header row
  • Code with syntax highlighting for over 60 languages
  • HTML as the rendered page (scripts don't run and nothing is loaded from the network, so it's a safe way to look at a generated report)
Reading a CSV as a table, with the folder and terminal still in view.

When I notice something wrong, like a typo in a config file or a value that's off, there's an Edit button right in the preview. I fix it, it saves automatically, and I carry on, without launching an editor or finding the same file again.

This one matters to me more than it might seem. With ADHD, small problems that I notice but can't fix immediately have a habit of never getting fixed at all. If fixing something means opening another app, there's a good chance I won't come back to it. If it's one click away, it actually gets done.

Doorway 3: the FTP or cloud client

This was the doorway that took me furthest away from what I was doing. A server is a different machine, so it always seemed natural that it would live in a different app.

But a different app means getting used to a different layout and different shortcuts every time you switch, and on top of that I'd usually need a separate SSH window, where I'd navigate to the same remote folder all over again just to run a command there.

In Iruka, remote storage shows up as ordinary folders:

  • SFTP: you save a server once, right-click it and choose Mount as SFTP, and then you browse it like any local folder.
  • FTP and S3-compatible cloud storage (Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, MinIO) are mounted in the same way.
  • SMB, AFP, NFS and WebDAV are mounted natively through macOS.

The bit I'm proudest of is that when you browse an SFTP mount, the SSH terminal follows you on the server. If you browse into /home/demo/results, the shell underneath is in /home/demo/results on the remote machine. It feels like the server is just another folder in the same room.

My Mac on the left and a server on the right, each with its own terminal following along.

If you put your Mac on one side and the server on the other in dual pane mode, and turn on View → Show Both Terminals, you can run something on the server, look at the output, drag it over to your Mac, and run a local command on the copy, all without leaving the window. (SFTP, FTP and cloud mounts need a one-time setup, which I go through in the SFTP walkthrough.)

Doorway 4: carrying things from room to room

This one feels very ADHD to me. Say I need three files from three different folders copied into one place. The usual way is to copy one, go to the destination, paste it, go back, find the next one, and so on. Every time I go back, I risk forgetting which file I needed next, or getting distracted by something else in that folder.

Iruka has a Drop Stack, a little shelf at the top of the sidebar. As you come across files you need, you drag them onto it. It doesn't copy anything at that point; it just remembers where they are. When you get to the destination, you click Copy Here or Move Here.

Files collected from different folders, waiting on the shelf until I get to the destination.

For me it works a bit like a notepad for working memory: the shelf keeps track of what I'm carrying, so I don't have to hold it in my head. It's shared across tabs and windows, it's still there after you quit the app, and both actions can be undone with ⌘Z if you click the wrong thing.

Doorway 5: finding your way back after you drift off anyway

None of this makes me impossible to distract. I still drift off, a notification still gets me sometimes, and I still come back to a folder twenty minutes later wondering what on earth I was doing there.

A couple of things help me pick up where I left off:

  • The file list shows what changed. In a git repository, changed files get a small status badge right in the list, so you can see what you (or your AI agent) were working on before you got sidetracked.
  • The Review pane shows exactly how they changed. It lists every changed file, with a line-by-line diff, right next to the browser. It's the closest thing I have to a note from my past self saying where I was.
After a distraction, the diff tells me where I was.

If I can't remember where something was, I can type a path in the URL bar with Tab autocomplete, the same way I would in a shell. Or I can use Power Search, which searches file contents with grep and regex and doesn't need an index, so "it had the word 'threshold' in it somewhere" is enough to find a file.

What this is, and what it isn't

I want to be careful here, because there's a lot of overpromising around ADHD.

A file manager isn't a treatment. It won't fix your attention or make you finish things. What it can do is cut down on how often your tools force you to rebuild your train of thought from scratch. For me, having fewer doorways means losing the thread less often, and when I do lose it, I get back on track more quickly. That holds whichever way your ADHD shows up, and probably even if you don't have ADHD at all.

Iruka also isn't an IDE. There's no debugger or language server, and the editing in the preview pane is meant for quick fixes. It's first and foremost a Finder replacement, with dual panes, tabs, batch rename and list/column/icon views, written natively in Swift and quick to start. Removing doorways is simply how it turned out, because I was building it for my own head, and it's now where I spend most of my working day.

If any of this sounds like your day, try it on a real task rather than a demo. Pick something that usually has you bouncing between three apps, and see how many doorways are left.

brew install --cask dorienh/iruka/iruka

You can also download it from iruka.sh. There's a 30-day free trial with no credit card needed, and then a one-time $19.99 license rather than a subscription. It runs on macOS 14 or later, on both Apple Silicon and Intel.

And if you have ADHD, whichever kind, and you run into a doorway I haven't dealt with yet, please tell me on GitHub Discussions. I read every post, several features have come straight from there, and I'd love the next one to come from someone whose brain works a bit like mine.

Dorien Herremans is the developer of Iruka and has inattentive ADHD. This article is based on personal experience and isn't medical advice.

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