01 — A macOS taskbar replacement 02 — Written in Swift / SwiftUI 03 — Apple Silicon · macOS 13+ 04 — Free · source available

A taskbar.
For the people
who never wanted
a dock.

aTaskbar pins a proper, Windows- and KDE-style bar to the bottom of every display on your Mac. Running windows show up as labeled buttons. Hover, you get a live thumbnail. Click, you get the window. No magnification, no bouncing, no compromises.

The Dock is a beautiful thing to use look at. It zooms. It bounces. It forgets which windows you had open.

aTaskbar is the opposite of that — an honest row of buttons, one per window, exactly where you left them, on every display, all the time.

No magnificationWindows are buttons, not fish.
No mysteryEvery window, always visible.
Your wayGroup windows, or don't.
Always herePin what you need.

Nine things the Dock refuses to do.

Every feature exists because the default macOS behaviour made someone, somewhere, stop working and sigh. aTaskbar replaces sighing with shipping.

→ 001 / core

One button per window.
Not per app.

aTaskbar surfaces each window as its own button — title, icon, the lot. Click a Safari window, you land on that window, not the frontmost one.

→ 002 / hover

Live thumbnails.
Hover, and see.

Hover any window button for a real, current screen capture — never stale, never cached past the point of usefulness.

→ 003 / displays

On every
display. Really.

One bar per display, rebuilt on hot-plug. No "primary only", no second-class monitors.

→ 004 / launcher

A start menu,
because of course.

Walks /Applications, /System/Applications, ~/Applications. Launches things. Keyboard-first. Familiar.

→ 005 / pins

Pin what
you need.

Pin an app and it stays. Running or not — it lives on the bar until you say otherwise. Finder and Safari by default.

→ 006 / order

A stable order.
Across everything.

New windows slot in next to their siblings. Order is persisted — nothing shuffles after a relaunch or a sleep cycle.

→ 007 / grouping

Group
or don't.

Want ten Safari tabs as one button? Toggle grouping. Want each window on its own? Toggle it off. Up to you.

→ 008 / widgets

Clock. Trash.
Nothing else.

A clock that tells time. A trash icon that empties itself on request. No weather, no stocks, no sparkline of your mood.

→ 009 / coexistence

Hides the
macOS Dock.

Opt in, and aTaskbar politely asks the Dock to stay gone — autohide on, delay infinite. Quit the app and your original Dock settings are restored exactly as you had them.

Built quietly,
in plain Swift.

No web runtime, no background helpers you didn't sign up for. A single native binary that wakes up with your Mac and paints a bar. That's it.

Runtime footprint, on a quiet desktop with 14 windows open:

[boot]aTaskbar launched
[bar] attach → display 1 · 2560×1440
[bar] attach → display 2 · 3840×2160
[win] observing → 4 apps · 14 windows
[mem] rss: 38.2 MB cpu: 0.1% fps: 60
[idle]ready

Small
print,
big
print.

Platform
macOS 13 Ventura or later · universal binary
Apple Silicon + Intel
Footprint
~38 MB resident · ~0.1% CPU idle
measured
Permissions
Accessibility · Screen Recording
required
Network
none · zero telemetry
offline-first
Source
Swift · SwiftUI + AppKit
source available

Put the bar
back where
it belongs.

macOS 13+ · free · source available