MacDock

A macOS-style dock and menu bar for Windows 11. Written from scratch in Rust on plain Win32. No Windhawk, no Explorer patching, about 13 MB of memory.

_{Every shot is a frame of one screen recording on a Windows 11 laptop. Full quality: docs/macdock.mp4}

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What you get

The dock Magnification that follows the pointer (cosine falloff, smoothed per frame) Genie minimize into the app's icon, and back out on restore Launch bounce, and an attention bounce when an app flashes for you Running dots, hover labels and red unread badges Drag to reorder, drag out to remove, right-click for windows, Keep in Dock, Show in Explorer and Quit Auto-hide, and icons shrink once the dock reaches the screen edges Icons sit on macOS-style squircle tiles

The genie The window you minimize is snapshotted and drawn as a 48-row mesh by MacDock's own scanline rasterizer (bilinear, anti-aliased edges, rows split across threads), then squeezed and poured into its icon. Restore from the dock plays it backwards. Windows' own minimize animation is switched off while MacDock runs and comes back when it quits.

Battery, with real numbers Charge, time left, wear and cycles, plus where the power goes: CPU package power from Windows' energy meter (RAPL, no admin), NVIDIA GPU power from NVML, and the rest. On battery the total is measured; on the adapter it is estimated from a "rest" value MacDock learns while you are unplugged.

Control Center Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, Dark Mode, Windows power mode, brightness and volume, plus now-playing media. Next to it: a Wi-Fi menu that scans and joins networks, and a ^ item that hosts your notification-area icons (Discord, Steam, …).

The menu bar

• The app in front, in bold, with File / Edit / View / Window / Help menus that send the real shortcuts (Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Z, …) to that app
• System menu with Automatically Hide Dock and Quit MacDock
• Battery, Wi-Fi, search, Control Center and the clock (which opens the notification center)
• AI usage for Claude Code and Codex: a ring with the limit closest to running out and the live burn rate in tok/s. Its flyout shows tok/s over 5 and 30 minutes, the last 24 hours, each limit with the points used per 5 / 30 minutes, when the current pace would hit it, and every session that burned tokens in the last 30 minutes (title, project, model, branch, its own tok/s). Read from the agents' local logs (~/.claude/projects, ~/.codex/sessions); by default nothing is sent anywhere. Codex reports its own limits. Claude Code logs none: turn on ClaudeUsageOAuth to read its real 5-hour and weekly limits from Anthropic with Claude Code's own login (every 2 minutes, only to api.anthropic.com; MacDock never refreshes the token), or set ClaudeLimit5h for an estimate from local tokens.

It stays out of the way

• Dock and menu bar are real AppBars: maximized windows stop at them.
• A fullscreen game hides both, puts the render loop to sleep and removes the mouse hook. On the author's laptop that measured 0.00% CPU and a 17 MB working set while a game was in front.
• Idle on the desktop: 0% CPU and about 13 MB private memory, because nothing redraws unless something is moving (see Rust vs the old C# build).

Install

Download: grab macdock.exe from the latest release and run it. Windows 11 only, nothing else to install. Each release is built by GitHub Actions from its tag.

Build from source: you need Windows 11 and Rust. Follow these steps in order:

1. Install Rust from rustup.rs (run rustup-init.exe, accept the defaults).
2. Switch to the GNU toolchain, so you don't need Visual Studio Build Tools:

   rustup default stable-x86_64-pc-windows-gnu

3. Open a new terminal, then build and run:

   git clone https://github.com/GodrezJr2/MacDock.git
   cd MacDock
   cargo build --release
   .\target\release\macdock.exe

The first build takes a few minutes because it compiles the dependencies.

The result is one ~1 MB exe with no runtime to install; copy it wherever you like.

MacDock hides the Windows taskbar while it runs and restores it when you quit.

• Quit: Windows logo in the menu bar → Quit MacDock
• If it was killed and the taskbar is still hidden: macdock.exe --restore
• Start with Windows: Windows logo in the menu bar → Open MacDock at Login

Configure

Settings live in %APPDATA%\MacDock\config.json, created on first run.

Key	Default	What it does
Pinned	Explorer, Chrome, Outlook, Terminal, VS Code, Discord, Settings	Dock items: shell:AppsFolder\<AppID>, a .lnk or an .exe
IconSize	52	Icon size at rest, in pixels
Magnify	1.75	Size of the icon under the pointer, relative to rest
AutoHide	false	Slide the dock away until the pointer touches the bottom edge
Genie	true	Genie minimize and restore
IconTiles	true	Put every icon on a squircle tile
Badges	true	Red unread badges
MenuBar	true	Show the menu bar
TrayIcons	true	Host notification-area icons behind the ^ item
HideTaskbar	true	Hide the Windows taskbar while MacDock runs
AiUsage	true	Claude Code / Codex usage item in the menu bar (shown once either has logs)
ClaudeUsageOAuth	false	Read Claude's real 5-hour / weekly limits from api.anthropic.com/api/oauth/usage with the login in ~/.claude/.credentials.json
ClaudeLimit5h	null	Tokens per 5-hour Claude block that count as 100% (input + cache writes + output)

A crash writes %APPDATA%\MacDock\panic.log and still puts the taskbar back.

How it works

The frosted dock without a blur API

Windows ignores window regions for layered windows, so accent blur behind a rounded plate showed up as a black or grey square. The plate is instead painted with a blurred slice of your wallpaper, mapped to its position on screen. Because the dock is an AppBar, the wallpaper is almost always what sits behind it.

A genie with no flash

For a title-bar minimize, a low-level mouse hook (on its own thread) sees the press on the minimize button and MacDock pre-draws the first frame from a fresh snapshot; on release the overlay is shown from the hook itself, so the animation is already up when the window disappears. Only the mesh's bounding box is redrawn and pushed to the screen each frame. Snapshots are shrunk off the UI thread and saved to disk, so windows minimized before a restart still animate on restore.

Unread badges

The taskbar keeps app badges to itself, so the count is the larger of a (N) prefix in the window title and the Action Center toasts that arrived since you last had the app in front (read from the notification database through the system's own winsqlite3.dll).

Battery power on a laptop that does not report it

The battery driver only knows the battery side. On battery its discharge rate is the whole system's draw; on the adapter nothing measures the input. MacDock reads CPU package energy through Windows' Energy Meter Interface and GPU power through NVML, and learns the rest (screen, RAM, SSD, fans) while unplugged. Sensors are read off the UI thread, and a sleeping NVIDIA GPU is left asleep instead of being woken every second.

Known limits

• Built and tested on one machine: a Windows 11 laptop at 2560×1600, 125% scale, with an NVIDIA GPU. Other setups may show rough edges; issues are welcome.
• Dock and menu bar live on the primary monitor; other monitors have no taskbar while MacDock runs.
• While the ^ tray flyout is open, a WinUI 3 app started at that moment can fail to start, because the tray host registers its own Shell_TrayWnd. The host only runs while that flyout is open.
• GPU power needs an NVIDIA GPU; without one the breakdown shows CPU and the rest.

Rust vs the old C# build

MacDock started as C# / WPF on .NET 10 and was rewritten in Rust (plain Win32, tiny-skia, WinRT through the windows crate) to make it lighter. Same features, same config.json. Measured on the same laptop and screen, 20 s idle plus a 10 s scripted pointer sweep over the dock:

	C# / WPF	Rust
Private memory	320-379 MB	12.9 MB
CPU idle	0.04-0.6%	0%
CPU while magnifying	2.0-2.3%	1.65%
Threads	21-26	11
On disk	30 MB + .NET runtime	1.1 MB exe

The C# version is kept at the tag csharp-final.

Credits

• Built by @GodrezJr2 with Claude Code as an AI pair programmer.
• macOS and the Dock are trademarks of Apple Inc. MacDock is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple.

License

MIT