Menu-bar launcher · macOS 26 · Apple Silicon

Double-tap ⌘.
Type. Done.

Barkley is a tiny, native launcher for your Mac. A Liquid Glass search panel that does whatever its plugins do, and plugins are just shell scripts or Rust binaries you can write in minutes.

Download for macOS View source

audio

MacBook Pro SpeakersOutput · Built-in Current
AirPods ProNot connected · used today Connect ↩
Studio DisplayOutput · USB
MacBook Pro MicrophoneInput · Built-in Current

Why Barkley

Small, fast, and yours
to extend.

No account, no telemetry, no background indexing. Barkley waits in the menu bar and asks its plugins only when you type.

Instant

Double-tap ⌘ or press ⌥Space. The panel pops up in tens of milliseconds and idles at about 18 MB.

Native Liquid Glass

Real AppKit and NSGlassEffectView, written in Rust. It looks and feels like Spotlight, with springy micro-animations.

Plugins in any language

A plugin is a folder with a manifest and an executable that prints JSON. Shell, Rust, Python, anything.

Fuzzy, ranked results

Every plugin answers in parallel. Results are ranked together, and ⌘1–⌘9 runs any row instantly.

Persistent plugins

Plugins with slow startup stay running and answer over stdin, so even CoreAudio lookups keep up with typing.

Open source

GPL-3.0-or-later, with a supply-chain gate on every dependency. Read every line before you run it.

Bundled plugins

Useful the moment it starts.

Web search, unit conversion, audio devices, quitting apps and emptying the Trash, all built as ordinary plugins you can copy.

10 km to mi

6.21 mi10 km = 6.21 mi Copy ↩

Units · length, mass, volume, temperature, data

kill slack

SlackPID 4312 Quit ↩
Slack HelperPID 4318

Kill · quit any process by name

empty tr

Empty TrashPermanently deletes 42 items Empty ↩
Search Google for “empty tr”Web search fallback

Empty Trash · with the item count first

Write your own

A plugin is a folder
and a script.

Barkley passes what you typed as an argument and reads rows back as JSON. Each row can open a URL, copy text, or run a command. Need speed or system APIs? The Rust SDK is a few lines.

Plugin guide →

plugins/hello/manifest.toml

name = "Hello"
keyword = "hi"
run = "./run.sh"

plugins/hello/run.sh

#!/bin/sh
# Barkley runs this with what you typed after "hi".
cat <<JSON
{"items": [{
  "title": "Hello, $1!",
  "icon": {"symbol": "hand.wave"},
  "action": {"type": "copy", "text": "Hello, $1!"}
}]}
JSON

Get Barkley

Download the app from GitHub Releases, move it to Applications, and double-tap ⌘. No sign-up, no telemetry, nothing in the cloud.

Download the app Build from source →

Apple Silicon · macOS 26+ · GPL-3.0-or-later

Up and running in three steps

1
DownloadGet the latest Apple Silicon build.
2
Move to ApplicationsRight-click → Open the first time; it isn't notarized.
3
Double-tap ⌘Allow Accessibility, or use ⌥Space without it.

Double-tap ⌘.Type. Done.

Small, fast, and yours to extend.