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boringBar

a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS

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Hi HN!I recently switched from a Fedora/GNOME laptop to a MacBook Air. My old setup served me well as a portable workstation, but I’ve started traveling more while working remotely and needed something with similar performance but better battery life. The main thing I missed was a simple taskbar that shows the windows in the current workspace instead of a Dock that mixes everything together.I built boringBar so I would not have to use the Dock. It shows only the windows in the current Space, lets you switch Spaces by scrolling on the bar, and adds a desktop switcher so you can jump directly to any Space. You can also hide the system Dock, pin apps, preview windows with thumbnails, and launch apps from a searchable menu (I keep Spotlight disabled because for some reason it uses a lot of system resources on my machine).I’ve been dogfooding it for a few months now, and it finally felt polished enough to share.It’s for people who like macOS but want window management to feel a bit more like GNOME, Windows, or a traditional taskbar. It’s also for people like me who wanted an easier transition to macOS, especially now that Windows feels increasingly user-hostile.I’d love feedback on the UX, bugs, and whether this solves the same Dock/Spaces pain for anyone else.P.S. It might also appeal to people who feel nostalgic for the GNOME 2 desktop of yore. I started my Linux journey with it, and boringBar brings back some of that feeling for me.

HN · launched Apr 12, 2026 · 520 upvotes (top 1%) · 1 view

Niche: macos system utilities · 448 launches, 31 in the last 7 days ▼ -30% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • Prosumer
  • Not AI
  • Commercial product

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

No Building a reliable macOS dock and window manager requires deep, complex, and poorly documented macOS Accessibility APIs, CoreGraphics private window server APIs, ScreenCaptureKit, and multi-display state management across macOS updates.

What it would actually take: A developer needs extensive experience with Swift/Objective-C, macOS Accessibility (`AXUIElement`), Quartz Window Services (`CGWindowListCopyWindowInfo`), and ScreenCaptureKit for live thumbnails. The hardest challenge is reliably tracking undocumented macOS Space changes, full-screen transitions, and window hierarchies without crashing or draining battery, which AI coding assistants consistently hallucinate or fail to handle cleanly.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: DockDoor, ubar, Taskbar, BoringBar

Concerns raised: Screen recording permissions required, Inconsistent window handling across apps (Steam, etc.), Multi-monitor display issues (wrong apps shown per screen), Offline activation server dependency, No settings/onboarding clarity

Feature requests: Option to use without screen-recording permissions, Auto-hide feature, Multi-monitor support with per-screen app filtering, Active window click-to-focus (not just from bar), Center-aligned active window icons option

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 840 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #6 of 841 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 165 days after the earliest competitor.

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.