Show HN: DockFlow – Switch between multiple macOS Dock layouts instantly

Your tool also solves something that is a big frustration with spaces: they can’t be renamed

There are a couple of tools for renaming them but they don’t work very well, at least not on apple silicon macs

So with DockFlow you actually get to name your different contexts, which is really nice

Totally wrong. First saying win9x doesn't make any sense. You can say Windowsish is some way but not less than current one.

But that being said, it is wrong because everything is possible to suit to your taste. Cinnamon itself can look like and work how you want it, Mac like, or Windows like, or totally different. But you could also switch easily to other distribution or change the desktop or task manager as you see fit.

In MacOS you are hopeless, the system itself is rigid. I had hope with Ubar to get a better experience but it is a useless crap, not by it's own fault I think because of having no possibility to improve things.

Otherwise, sure changing is always momentarily disrupting but people are really suffering from the bad ergonomic of MacOS even if they might not really realize it after decade learning of tricks to get around as much as possible of all the issues and frustration with the interface. Like needing the tool of this article to try to make the experience bearable as I said.

To me, it is like the previous decade with the former generation of Windows users saying that they had no issue with windows that was working perfectly flawlessly for them without not realizing the issues plugging a new device, the constant nagging of popup and error windows, the regular slowdown and data loss. But they were used to it. Nowadays, no one will contest anymore that Windows is really not good.

In my opinion, the ergonomic issues in MacOS are really physically painful to the point where users might have hands issues in a few years. You are constantly needed to do complex movement to go from one window to another when it should not be needed or just be a click. Like when you have things like multiple web browser windows, you have to constantly do multiple clicks or complex movement to open the list of windows in the task bar select the right one, then do again just the other window being in another position in the list, and so on. Things like reading a pdf and copying different sections in a document or form in another app is terrible having to switch constantly from one to another. There are hundreds of things like that like the impossibility totally maximize windows without being the annoying full Fullscreen, except on your taskbar, installation of apps is a joke except for devs that will install and only use brew; there are constantly people leaving meetings to go find and set the obscure mac setting to enable the camera or screen sharing that turns itself off randomly; in 8gb Mac that was the standard, Mac was silently evicting most apps once you switch, resulting in 1 or 2 seconds to go from one app to another, ...

The dock not appearing on multiple screens is a gripe I share, but otherwise Windows’ handling of multiple monitors drives me up a wall. It’s unbelievable that in the newest build of Win11, wallpapers can’t be set per-screen without the hack of combining images, as is how it’s incapable of switching virtual desktops independently between monitors. Both Linux DEs and macOS have solidly outclassed Windows here for decades now.

Ah yes, I forgot this funny joke where for years I didn't understand why the dock was suddenly jumping to the other monitor without wanting to come back.

And finally discovered that you should do a strange movement of two fast tap to the bottom of the screen without mouse to move the dock on this screen. Would always happen unexpected but will be very hard to execute well to bring the dock back.

I haven't coded for macOS for a while... well, for almost ten years :-) But as far as I remember, there's a 'NotificationCenter' which broadcasts system state changes to apps. Maybe it has a 'Desktop changed' event?