Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS

I am the target audience for this, from a UX and tech perspective. It addresses a problem I have and for which I periodically audition solutions.

A subscription for a menu bar, though, kills it for me. I have apps on Macs that are over 20 years old. Some of those companies don’t exist anymore. I’m not going to risk paying $100 for a decade of your app and hope that your company, or your goodwill, stays around that long.

While I don't use a Mac as my primary anymore, I'm surprised I like the look of this! It actually looks quite Mac-like as well.

Subscription is a big nope here, though. Especially for Mac software, I'd expect something where you pay for one major version, that is guaranteed to works on specific macOS versions, and gets minor bugfix updates too. But maybe the next macOS version requires a newer major version update to run, in which case you pay an upgrade fee to buy the next major version - or maybe the next major version has new features you might want to upgrade to as well.

My old Macs are stuck on 10.13, and I see Ubar mentioned elsewhere in this thread and that it's still compatible with 10.13. I might consider the $30 one off price to buy Ubar and keep it forever, but I wouldn't do a $10 subscription.

https://github.com/nagisa77/OpenBoringBar Only one day after the release … so far I know two oss alternatives to boring bar

Subscription on something like this is goofy, and extra subscription per seat even for personal is goofier. For free, I can use Alfred/Raycast, Aerospace, and either sketchybar or zebar and have all this functionality executed even more skillfully and ergonomically. If you want to throw money into it, Alfred power pack is £34 and supports a great company with a lifetime purchase.

But I also understand I’m not the target audience for this, and some of my coworkers that wanted a Mac because “it’s a Mac” and now compare everything to Windows would probably use it. I’ll just have to feel bad for their wallets.

OP here - based on the feedback, I’ve switched boringBar to a perpetual license for personal use: https://boringbar.app

It’s now $40 for 2 devices and includes 2 years of updates. After that, you can keep using the version you have, or choose to pay for updates again later.

For businesses, I’m keeping the existing annual pricing.

A lot of the comments on pricing were fair, and I appreciate people being direct about it. I still care a lot about long-term maintenance for an app like this, but I think this is a better balance.

When I got a Macbook many years ago, I was surprised how often little utility software like this cost money. I was just so used to the abundance of open source and freeware in the Windows/Linux world.

No judgement either way, I get that developers want to be compensated for their time. I just always found the difference in culture curious. I guess it's because if you're willing to spend the extra premium for Apple products, you're probably also willing to spend a little extra premium on the software too.

The issue I have with UI replacements is that I now have a dependency that MUST be installed, otherwise I have to learn how to UX again from scratch. If I ever get a new Mac, I now MUST install boringBar, otherwise it will be like learning a new OS workflow, akin from switching from Mac to Windows. If Apple ever updates anything to where the plugin would stop working, I now need to do the same adaptation. It's fun for a while to do things like this, but in my older computing age, I can't bear the cognitive effort, so I tend to just use mostly-default UI.

Hi!

Over the years, I've tried several of these dock replacement apps. The one that stuck the longest was uBar (which I used with a setup similar to what you have here, emulating a "windows taskbar".

I've hit issues with most of them that forced me to move back to the normal Dock, but the number one issue has always been around notification badges: they always seemed to break in strange ways.

For example, can your dock show badges for iMessage if the app isn't open? Does it get the updated badge count without me opening it? Say I receive a SMS/iMessage, does it instantly show a counter next to the unopened pinned messages app? None of the other apps successfully did this when I tried them...

I don't know if there are other apps like this, but iMessage was by far the biggest offender. Perhaps system settings too?

P.S.: Congrats on the launch :)

P.P.S.: As others have said, I think a subscription for this will rub many people the wrong way (I am one of them). If I'm paying for a subscription, I expect this to be pretty bug-free and have at least monthly updates. I wouldn't ask this of other subscription-based apps, but for one that replaces a system-level component and wants me to keep paying, you bet I am holding it to a high standard! I've wasted too much money on other replacements and gotten very little value out of that.

I love that you've made this, but in a world of never ending subscriptions, a subscription to a taskbar is just not something I (or many I imagine) can justify - no matter how low the price.

We really have entered the age of everything being a subscription.

There are MORE apps that have a better reputation like sidebar , dock fix , active dock (has been around for years and years) , and a subscription does not make sense since most can be done for free like window previews with dock door , group windows by app is free in desktop and dock settings for Mission Control , the native dock can also do many things like notification badges, click to show desktop or use a hot corner or trackpad gesture , pin apps in the dock , there are a billion app launchers , spotlight is built in . Most people will stay away from subscriptions as I have observed in the comment below (Pls be nice I’m new here and I don’t know how to comment properly )

I would pay $10 one time for this; a subscription seems excessive to me.

Feedback:

- Would like the ability to customize colours or themes (i.e. taskbar background, application menu button colour, chip background colour, chip active state colour, etc.)

- In another comment you mention that you haven't figured out how to display badge counts without having the app open, but I am not seeing badge counts even with the app open. For example, when someone sends me a message in Messages, the badge count that shows up in the dock never shows up in boringBar. Strangely, other apps that do not show a badge count in my dock show a badge count in boringBar! (This one is a deal breaker for me given the amount of messaging I do through that app. The badge count is something I rely on a lot.)

- My preference is to have "Show Windows Names" enabled. But in certain apps it does not behave as I would expect. For example, when the Mac Messages app is open, it always has a conversation selected, which means the name of the Messages app in boringBar is always the name of the person whose last conversation you had selected. Messages may be a unique case, but for me I would like for it to just be called "Messages" no matter who I am talking to.

- On the subscription debate: I am not anti-subscription, but the value proposition has to be there. $10/month for a dock substitute is too much for me. That's $120/year. $1200/decade per user, for what amounts to a marginal quality of life improvement to the operating system. I think a proper price for something like this that is fair to the developer and to the end user is a $40 - $80 perpetual license with one year of updates included.

I use lawand's taskbar and have found it be very good.

Ah, good old Apple, where for only $9.99 a month, you can experience what Linux offered for free 15+ years ago.

In addition to changing bar size, would you consider supporting a multi-level bar? This is a Windows (pre-11) taskbar behavior where you can drag the top of the taskbar bar up to add additional rows of windows. uBar supports this, but the app overall doesn't behave well with my multi-monitor setup. Currently using Taskbar, but it's also buggy and only supports a single row.

Hi there! I really like this project and just bought a copy for myself.

It would be great to allow offline activation - as others have pointed out, using the application after the activation servers may go away is something that is useful for an application like this.

Also, the application viewer seems a bit clunky - please allow sorting pinned items via drag & drop, or always sort them alphabetically. A mouse over highlight effect is also missing.

I use uBar for this: https://ubarapp.com but this looks like a nice lightweight alternative!

One-time fee? I would be onboard instantly. Monthly fee? For what exactly? There is no recurring cost like server space or anything else. Nope, you lost me as a customer. For good.

$40 dollars is still too expensive for this feature. And the ui design looks like a linux app (which was intended), but im not sure most macOS users would want that

I had a go. Nice work. Two minor irritations I thought it would help with, but it didn't:

- Lots of iTerm shells open: easy to access, but iTerm’s window titles don't make it easy to find the one I want, and neither does this

- (the big one) Lots of browser windows each with multiple tabs make it hard to find the tab you want if it's not at the front of the window it's in. Would be more compelling if there were a way for it to look inside (eg,) Brave and represent each tab as a window

Otherwise: some lag in updating thumbnails occasionally confusing; it doesn't seem to do anything clever to cope when things spill off the right-hand end (eg, good time to group by app if you weren't already); quitting did not bring the dock back, as claimed.

Don't take it personally OP, but taskbar-as-a-service is objectively one of the funniest things I have ever seen posted on this site.

There is a natural law that says all operating systems, if they survive and evolve for long enough, become a Windows clone.

Looks excellent but I can’t wrap my head around how this is a subscription. Pricing the app even at a higher range ($40-50), one—time payment makes way more sense.

You could even require paying for “upgrades” for major updates in the future. (Similar to that of Sketch or some apps made by Panic)

+1 to amplify the voice that hates a subscription to a taskbar. If it was €15 one time I would’ve instantly bought it.

I am running the trial and it seems great except for two crucial deviations from Dock behavior. Clicking on a button ("chip") does not bring the associated window to the foreground. It does work when I hover over a chip and then click the preview of a specific window. But nothing happens when I directly click the button in the bar. The issue occurs regardless of whether an app has 1 or >1 windows open. In the latter case, I would prefer if clicking the button brings the most recently used window to the top.

Another observation: many macOS apps (e.g. pages, mail, keynote, etc.) like to stay open even without having any active windows. This is completely hidden by boringBar, which leads to tons of apps being open without the user being aware of it (-> memory waste). Furthermore, actually using such an app then requires me to awkwardly type the name of the app even though it's already open.

I think it would be better if such passive apps without windows still have chips, perhaps smaller ones without a window title.

Regarding the foreground issue, in case it's relevant: The app has all the permissions it requested. This is on a macOS 26.2 on a M4 MBP.

If you could add the ability to auto hide the bar and show it on mouseover, kind of like the dock, and also customize the active app color in the bar (it's a little bright for my taste), I would totally purchase a license.

I like it so far.

Some features I'd like:

- XL bar size - even large feels a bit small on a 6K display

- I have grouped windows off, but it would be nice if there was an option to still sort the chips by app, so all the app's windows are listed adjacent to eachother

- If not using the suggest idea above, it would also be nice to be able to drag and drop chips to sort them in the order I want

- Make the Applications menu open for clicks on the entire bottom left area of the screen so I can slam my cursor in the general direction, where it ends up at the bottom left pixel, and click like I could in Windows to open the Start menu

- Ability to give a desktop a name

- Ability to map a key or sequence (e.g. opt, opt) to open the Applications menu, again like how you could open Windows' Start menu with a key

Bugs:

- Clicking a chip to minimise a window, then clicking it again to restore it sometimes causes the window to change size.

- Quitting boringBar spawned three stacks of these: https://postimg.cc/WhmwHGNz even though it already has permissions granted. Clicking "Allow" just spawns another one so they never go away. boringBar is not running in Activity Monitor. Had no choice but to reboot.

It's expensive for me. Sidebar is half the price (lifetime license): https://sidebarapp.net

Trial link is giving a 404

Would it be possible to potentially expand the size options? Large just isn't large enough for me on my MBP; I'd like it to be nearly 2x the size, or roughly equivalent to the 150% 4k scaling factor I have on Windows. (I like the icon-only mode!)

On the default XDR M2 Pro MBP display I'm on, I have it set to the default scaling for reasons, but I'd really like to be able to scale the BoringBar to be... quite a lot larger... maybe a scale bar, or maybe add an XL and XXL option?

This is tremendously cool

Can you change the photos on the website to short videos? I don’t really understand how it works

That's nice! It feels polished and feature-full, but like others commented, I'm not seeing myself paying for this.

On my end, I managed to first develop an open-source alternative status bar based on Übersicht (https://github.com/Jean-Tinland/simple-bar) 6 years ago and then a standalone rewrite in Swift (https://github.com/Jean-Tinland/a-bar) if anyone is interested. Though both bars require yabai or AeroSpace to work.

First of all, this looks really nice, I mean REALLY nice. It’s obvious you put a lot of thought and work into making the UX work really well. I probably will not use it, I like macOS as it is and have gotten used to it over the past 10+ years. I am probably not the target user though, seems like it could be good for new users transitioning from Windows.

How does this work with the dock in macOS? I mean you only have so many places you can put the dock, certainly not the top because that’s reserved for the mighty blue Apple.

Love this and thank you for switching to perpetual, I will be signing up if the trial goes well as I am not satisfied with Sidebar's application behavior!

This is a great app but it highlights just how insane it is to use apple products where you have to pay a subscription fee for the 3rd party software that provides the basic OS functionality. With KDE Plasma I don't feel the need to install any additional plugins - everything is built-in, coherent and configurable to your liking.

I thought this was about hole making for a second. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boring_bar. I just bought a lathe last week at a fire sale so my brain is stuck in machine tool mode.

Well done. Buying this.

I love the landing page - ugh just so perfect for the HN audience. I am pretty happy with the dock but after reading your landing, I felt like I need it.

Also, don't listen to people about pricing. $10/year as you have it is already cheap considering I'll end up using it every day (if I like it). People will never be satisfied.

I am running Macs for over 20 years now and I wonder: why do we need Dock at all? I have hidden it over a decade ago and never ever used it. If anything, it gets in the way when I push the cursor to the edge of the screen.

(I exclusively use cmd-tab, which is a Docker feature)

Of coarse its a subscription...

IMO, this isn't priced competitively: * Mbar can be had for $15 on stacksocial * Sidebar is $21 w/ lifetime updates * DockDoor is free and OSS

Cant see how this app would fit into a subscription.

Great idea. But, I'm will to wait for the AI sloppified OSS version of this.

I think Mac OS window handling has become worse over the past years. But I don’t care for MS Windows style either (in fact I dislike it more). Do you happen to have a mode which more closely resembles the classic spatial Finder of yesteryear?

I'm with other people here. Make this a one-time purchase. If a major macOS update requires significant changes to keep the program working, make that a new version that people need to buy. A pretty standard way to keep people from feeling screwed if the break happens right after they bought your software is to give them the next version of your software for free if you release it within 1 year of their purchase.

I think you're actually likely to make more money that way because people will pass on adding yet another subscription to the pile they have already.

This is great. Gonna give it a try couple of days. The first thing that I've noticed, on lighter bg the contrast between the buttons (minimised) and the bar's bg is quite low. It looks like a single bar when there's a light bg. Would have been fantastic if there was an option to high contrast option (Also my eyesight is quite crap, which doesn't help either)

I don't "get" this: I switch between Mac and Windows a lot.

If you prefer the way Windows works, just use Windows! Both platforms have their merits.

great work! i'm started trying it and it seems like it solves a bunch of issues i have with the native docker.

the only problem that i have, right now, is colors: i usually have everything in my computer as black[0], so the white highlight on the bar is so jarring! being able to replace that with something else is going to be great.

https://i.imgur.com/OqnZCUT.png

I would like to use this product but I use 5 Macs regularly. I do not see an option to use it on more than 2 Macs. Is there a solution for a user with more than 2?

Nice work! Always great to see independent macOS utilities. I'm building something similar in the Apple Music space, a library cleanup tool that detects duplicates, fixes metadata and checks lossless availability. The macOS dev ecosystem needs more of these focused, single-purpose tools.