RetroWin – Bringing the classic Windows taskbar back, on macOS

Pengpeng — Thu, 14 May 2026 03:21:45 +0000

Why I built this

I switched from Windows to a Mac about three years ago. The Dock has never stopped annoying me, and I think the reasons are objectively interesting, not just nostalgia:

You can't tell which windows are open. A dot under an icon means "running" — but if Chrome has 3 windows you see one dot. To switch to a specific window you right-click → pick from a list, or fall through Mission Control.
Minimized windows vanish. They collapse into a tiny thumbnail at the right edge of the Dock. With a busy Dock, they're effectively invisible. I've watched coworkers lose track of windows for hours.
No window titles. The Dock shows app icons. With four VS Code windows open, good luck telling them apart without hovering.
Notification badges are a red dot. Easy to miss. A flashing button is not.
No system tray. macOS has the menu bar, but it's at the top, space-constrained, and the notch ate half of it. The Windows taskbar — particularly the Win7 / pre-Win11 era — solved these in 1995 and the design has held up. I wanted that on macOS without giving up macOS itself. So: don't replace the Dock, run alongside it.

What it actually does

This isn't a CSS reskin of a Dock replacement. The window-management is real:

Tracks every window on every screen via macOS Accessibility API; renders one button per window or per app (your choice).
Hover preview of window contents (CGWindowListCreateImage at low frequency).
Pin to taskbar, drag-to-reorder, persists across closes.
Per-monitor independent taskbars — enable/disable on each display individually.
Auto-hide with edge-trigger reveal.
System tray with clock, volume slider (with output-device switcher), input-method indicator, custom app tray icons.
Notification flash — orange button pulse when an app's badge or banner fires. Detected from the Notification Center DB + dock-tile badge changes.
Start Menu per theme: Win98 single column, XP two-column with sidebar, Win7 with search, Win10 tiled grid with live-tile-style pinning.
Power menu (Sleep / Restart / Shut Down / Lock / Log Off) with a theme-matching dialog for each — yes, including the XP "It is now safe to turn off your computer" energy.
Auto-update via Sparkle.
6 languages (EN, 简中, 繁中, 日本語, 한국어, FR).

The themes are the point

Each theme is a from-scratch render: button bevels, gradient stops, font hinting, the corner radii on Aero glass, the exact pixel offset of the Win98 raised-edge. I rebuilt the assets rather than ripping bitmaps because I wanted everything to scale cleanly from 50% to 200% (a hard constraint on Retina + multi-DPI setups).
Win10 uses NSVisualEffectView for Acrylic. Win7 uses a layered blur stack to fake Aero on macOS (which doesn't expose the same compositor primitives). Win98 / XP are plain Core Graphics — no blur, just bevels and gradients, which oddly turned out to be the most fun to draw.

Honest comparison vs uBar

uBar has owned this niche on macOS for a decade. Worth being upfront:

	RetroWin	uBar
Look	Pixel-perfect Win98 / XP / 7 / 10	Modern, customizable colors
Start Menu	Full per-theme menus + search + tiles	Simple Start menu
Window preview	Yes	Yes
Notif flash	Win-style orange pulse	Badge dot
Price	Free core; ~$1.20 Pro	$30
Languages	6	2
Vibe	Era-accurate retro	Clean modern utility

If you want a modern Dock alternative, uBar is great. If you specifically want the Windows taskbar you grew up with, that's where RetroWin fits.

Things I underestimated

A few war stories for any Mac dev considering this kind of project:

Accessibility permission and code-signing. I'm not in the Apple Developer Program, so every release ships with a different ad-hoc signature, which means macOS revokes Accessibility every update. There's a documented FAQ workaround (remove + re-add in Privacy settings), but the right fix is buying into the $99/yr program — on the roadmap.
Window event polling. AXObserver gives you create/destroy events for windows, but not reliably across all apps. I ended up with a 1Hz reconcile loop on top of event-driven updates. CPU stays under 0.5% on an M2.
Notification detection. There's no public API. I read the Notification Center SQLite (~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.usernoted/db2/db) and watch dock-tile badge attributes via AX. Brittle but it works.
Multi-monitor + Spaces + fullscreen. Each fullscreen window lives in its own Space. Drawing the taskbar on top requires the right NSWindow.collectionBehavior flags or it just disappears when you swipe between Spaces. Took an embarrassing amount of trial and error.
Per-theme everything. It's tempting to share Start Menu code. Don't. The four eras have genuinely different interaction models — search is a first-class verb in Win7+, not in Win98 — and trying to abstract them produced worse code than four parallel implementations. ## What it's not
Not a Dock replacement. Run them together, or hide the Dock yourself in System Settings.
Not signed/notarized yet. Gatekeeper will warn on first launch — Open Anyway, or xattr -cr /Applications/RetroWin.app.
Not open source (yet). The release repo (issues + downloads) is public; the source isn't. Happy to discuss if there's interest.
Not a Windows compatibility layer. It's a taskbar. Your apps are still macOS apps. ## Try it Download the latest DMG from the GitHub releases page, drag to Applications, grant Accessibility, pick a theme. I'd genuinely love feedback on:
Theme accuracy — if you spot something un-period-correct, file an issue with a screenshot. I will fix it.
Edge cases on weird monitor setups (eGPU, mixed Retina/non-Retina, vertical screens).
Whether you'd want a Win11 theme. (I keep going back and forth on this. Win11's taskbar is the most controversial of the bunch.) Thanks for reading.

I built a Windows 98/XP/7 taskbar for macOS because the Dock drives me crazy

Pengpeng — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 13:43:30 +0000

I switched from Windows to Mac a few years ago and there's one thing I never got used to: the Dock.

Don't get me wrong, macOS is great. But the Dock has always felt like a downgrade from the Windows taskbar for actual window management:

You can't see which windows are open. The Dock shows a tiny dot under running apps. That's it. If Chrome has 5 windows open, you'd never know.
Minimized windows disappear. They shrink into some tiny thumbnail on the right side of the Dock that's easy to miss entirely.
No window titles. When you have multiple VS Code or Chrome windows, there's no way to tell them apart without hovering or using Mission Control.
Notifications are easy to miss. A small red badge vs. a flashing orange taskbar button — not even close.

So I built RetroWin — a fully functional Windows-style taskbar that runs on macOS, with pixel-perfect recreations of the classic Windows 98, XP, and Windows 7 themes.

What it does

3 classic themes — Win98 (gray 3D borders), WinXP (blue Luna), Win7 (Aero glass). Not just color swaps — every button, border, gradient, and icon is faithful to the originals.
Real window management — Every window gets its own taskbar button. Click to activate, click again to minimize. You can see window titles, merge or expand multi-window apps, and pin favorites.
Start Menu — A working Start Menu with your apps, pinned programs, system functions (shutdown, restart, lock screen), and a Run dialog.
System tray — Clock, volume control, input method indicator, and custom app icons in the tray area.
Notification flashing — When an app has a new notification, its taskbar button flashes orange, just like Windows.
Multi-monitor support — Independent taskbar on each display.
Auto-hide & scaling — Hides to the screen edge, 50%-200% scaling.

Screenshots

Windows 98:

Windows XP:

Windows 7:

How it compares to uBar

Some of you might know uBar, which is the main alternative in this space. The key differences:

RetroWin	uBar
Focus	Faithful classic Windows themes
Themes	Win98, WinXP, Win7
Start Menu	Full classic Start Menu
Price	Free (core features)
Nostalgia factor	Maximum

If you want a practical modern taskbar, uBar is solid. If you want to feel like it's 2001 again and you just installed XP on your first PC, that's what RetroWin is for.

It works alongside the Dock

RetroWin doesn't replace or modify the Dock. You can run both at the same time. Most people hide the Dock (System Settings → Desktop & Dock → auto-hide) and just use the taskbar.

Download

Free to download: https://github.com/a1245582339/RetroWin-Release/releases

Requires macOS 15.0+, supports Apple Silicon and Intel.

Website: https://retrowin-site.pages.dev

Would love to hear your thoughts. If you have feature requests or run into bugs, feel free to open an issue on GitHub or just comment here.

DEV Community: Pengpeng