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boringBar

a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS

Details

External ID
47742200
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
boringBar
Website domain
boringbar.app
Launched
April 12, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
520
Upvotes percentile
0.993573264781491
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

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.

Enrichment

Theme
macOS and desktop customization tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Dev tools
Audience
Prosumer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
macos taskbar replacement
Manually corrected
False

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 — 366 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #3 of 367 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 165 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.