PresButan alternative

PresButan was a small background program for the Mac: Return or Enter opened the selection in the Finder, the delete keys moved it to the trash. Exactly what switchers from Windows miss — and Brian Kendall's much-appreciated PresButan solved that problem for many years. Tasto owes it the idea.

On current macOS versions, PresButan is no longer maintained and no longer runs there. Anyone trying to install it today is left without a tool.

The two core mappings this is all about are identical:

• Return and Enter open the selection in the Finder — instead of renaming.
• Delete and fn⌫ move the selection to the trash.

Like PresButan, Tasto is a quiet background tool: it sits in the menu bar, has no Dock icon and only steps in while the Finder is frontmost.

Tasto isn't an update, it's a rebuild for macOS 14 and newer (verified up to macOS 27). A few things mattered to us in the rebuild:

• Rename detection: via the accessibility interface, Tasto detects whether a text field is focused — renaming, search — or a dialog is open. Then the keys pass through unchanged.
• ⌘Return renames: the old Return behaviour stays reachable, it just moves.
• Toggles instead of all-or-nothing: every mapping can be switched off individually, a pause toggle sits in the menu.
• Free: the PresButan functions — Return opens, Delete to the trash — stay free, forever. Direct download, no tracking, no ads, nothing gets sent.
• Six languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese.

If you want more, you can optionally get Tasto Pro (€3.99, one-time): it unlocks two Windows extras — Cut & Paste (⌘X/⌘V) and "close quits the app". The PresButan replacement itself stays free.

For those extras there are fine standalone helpers too: Command X on the App Store brings Cut & Paste, SwiftQuit quits apps on close. Each solves a single function well. Tasto carries PresButan's idea forward — maintained for current macOS, rename-aware, and all in one app.

More details on the Tasto page.