Show HN: An open source Launchpad for macOS 26 | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: An open source Launchpad for macOS 26

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An open sourced version of Launchpad that I enhanced, you can import from old system Launchpad (just one click), and most of things look same. There are also a lot of functions, like adjust / display / hide icon size and title, localize icons, game controller support, i18n, voice over, etc.

Still updating, open an issue if there are any problems. Hope this could help if someone updated to MacOS26 and not happy with new Launchpad :)

Thank you.

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> note that most of the README below are generated by Claude AI, haven't look into it, some information maynot be accurate. but for claude, you are absolutely right!

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here, but if you don't even stand behind your own readme, I struggle to trust your code.

I'm sorry, I thought this would be fun at first, but now it seems not to be, and it does cause confusion. I will rewrite it. My technical skills are not good when it comes to code and technology, far from good. But I will try to make sure all functions are tested and will not cause more problems. I'm still a student, I know I shouldn't use this as an excuse, but my only hope is that many Mac users who can't adapt to the new Launchpad will have more alternatives and more choices.Until Apple bring Launchpad back( if possible)

I’m curious to see a Swift developer’s opinion of the codebase - I have no means personally to judge the merits of this code, and I’m skeptical of the AI of it all.

I wasn't even aware Launchpad was removed in the newest version of Mac OS. It's very rare I'm upset to learn about a change, but I use Launchpad a lot so I'm glad people are working on alternatives.

The thing called Launchpad was removed, but its shortcuts still exist and take you into Spotlight's (new) applications panel. This gives you the searchable-list-of-apps that Launchpad offered, though it doesn't let you rearrange them... so depending on how you personally liked to use Launchpad it'll either be a perfect substitute or incredibly frustrating for you.

Incredibly frustrating seems to be the answer unfortunately. I loved Launchpad, but I'm also one of those weirdos who loved the Windows 8 full screen start menu.

I’m really surprised so many people miss it. It’s the slowest way to find an app. Command+Space and type a character or two and boom app is launching.

If you search, there’s a defaults command to bring it back. Haven’t installed 26, but I saw this somewhere if you’re like me and rely on LP to group apps whose names you won’t remember.

One easy thing I've been doing for years is just dropping the Applications directory onto my dock. Instant launcher. Otherwise I just use spotlight if I want to launch by typing.

I almost always use spotlight to launch apps. The rare occasions when I’ve used launchpad are when I momentarily forget an app’s name.

I can't say I miss Launchpad all that much, but I guess its nice to have a replacement for people who do. I've always used Spotlight via Cmd + Space to launch stuff.

The two things I always wished you could do in the old Launchpad (and would have made me hate it a lot less) are:

Configuring the size of the icon grid. Just give me the option to make it denser, the defaults were silly on external displays.

and the other is being able to completely exclude the nonsense apps like the 6 different Adobe Creative Cloud icons that would end up in there. Though it'd also be nice if Adobe didn't spew them all over the place in the first place...

I'm also used to Spotlight. One of the reasons is because I also use KDE and krunner has the same keybinding and almost the same functionality. But I still liked Launchpad (just like the app dashboard in KDE) as it shows me visually what I have installed.

Why? Well, there are some apps I have installed and forgotten, for example, I have several 3D printer slicers, but normally I only use one. I grouped them into a folder, so I could check what I have installed if I wanted to switch for whatever reason. I also had a folder called "useless", where I place everything that I don't used but I can't remove (Apple stuff, Safari extensions, bloat installed with LaTeX, and so on).

The new "apps" can't be organized. Everything is just thrown there, only sorted alphabetically. There's no reason for me to use that, if I remember what I want I can just type in Spotlight

PS: It's possible to bring back Launchpad in Tahoe through the command line. I only didn't that yet because I don't know how safe it is to do that.

Thank you for the reply, So in the current version, you can set the number of rows and columns, and you can also hide the software (not displayed in the launcher) and hide the title of the software. I checked the comments section, and it seems there are still quite a few performance issues... I'm not sure if this is an isolated incident or a common occurrence. I'll look into it.

I was hopeful, but it's not quite there yet. It's really, really slow on my M1 with Tahoe.

Do you mean when you first open the software, or when you go to other pages? It does feel sluggish when you first open it. Also the RAM usage is not that good. I hope I can do some optimization on it.

Swiping between pages is hit or miss. Its like it doesn't hook on the swipe. The search is really, really slow. I do have hundreds of "apps" on my machine, but it's still much slower than the native app navigator. Moving around apps to group them or rearrange them is probably the slowest part. I turned on dev fps monitor and it's showing 50fps.

That's not a good frame rate. My computer has this situation:

( ls /Applications/.app 2>/dev/null ls /System/Applications/.app 2>/dev/null ls ~/Applications/*.app 2>/dev/null ) | wc -l 730

For me, it was really slow at the beginning, but it got much better after that. I'm not sure why, but this at least shows that there are still big problems with the current performance...

How does your m1 run Tahoe overall? I haven’t updated because I fear it might have degraded performance?

Overall, it's been fine. (M1 Max 32GB) There are lots of bugs in apple's apps and a few bugs in other apps. I probably wouldn't have upgraded if I didn't need the new Xcode (which has been buggy). I can't think of one new feature that would make we stay on Tahoe if I didn't need the new Xcode. I would hold off for a .1 unless you really wanted it.

One mistake I did make when upgrading was not updating little snitch, and I couldn't get any network connection for a bit until I reinstalled that app via USB.

Fails to build for me on 14.8. Not sure if the bit about not being able to open folders was indicative of building on 26 and copying to another Mac and this is expected. I won't be updating to 26 any time soon, but I still wanted to check it out.

I have to admit: these LLM-generated READMEs look terrible.

You are absolutely right,(I am not Claude) the bottom part of the readme looks not that good. I will try to rewrite. :)

There's more than the README that is generated.

Yes, which completely undermines my trust and confidence in such a project.

Yes, I understand how you feels. I did use AI for documentation and the project. I know that's not ideal and probably comes across as low-effort.

But honestly, I was genuinely frustrated with macOS 26's launchpad changes and wanted to build something to fix it. Yeah, the project has the problem but I'm trying to improving it. I just simply want there are more solutions, more alternative there. For the technology side, I am still a student, and my technical skills are not good, far from good. I just want the problem to be fixed, and for us to have better tools.

It’s a one person passion project. We’re grateful you even showed us. Perhaps someone with strong opinions about open source will volunteer to write over the parts they don’t like.

Thank you! :) I think it's great that different people have different ideas. Questioning is actually a good thing, it helps drive progress in many different areas. I'm truly grateful. I'll keep fixing and updating the software, since I need to use it everyday.

Agreed. Don't be discouraged by negative comments and just keep on building.

Agreed. People are being too harsh in this post

Nothing wrong with using AI to write code.

It's probably good to disclose this upfront and since you're a student that can be a starting point to keep improving the project until it's well architected and you understand every detail of it and why it's designed this way.

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