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Show HN: An open source Launchpad for macOS 26 (github.com)

51 points by roversx ↗ HN
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.

9 comments of 30

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ewxyz
I have to admit: these LLM-generated READMEs look terrible.
oidar
I was hopeful, but it's not quite there yet. It's really, really slow on my M1 with Tahoe.
philo23
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...

unsnap_biceps
> 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.

phatskat
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.
SkyeCA
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.
fleeno
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.
alsetmusic
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.