It’s been close to half a decade since I switched to macOS from Windows. Yet, I still haven’t gotten used to the dock. Its function feels too limiting to me, despite being the centerpiece of desktop multitasking. Clicking an app, for example, oddly brings all of its open windows into focus; I can’t view window thumbnails either to recall what I was doing in a messy workspace; It wastes precious screen real estate on its flanks. So I turned to the last resort: replicate the Windows taskbar on my Mac.
With the help of an app called “uBar,” I replaced my Mac’s dock with a Windows-style taskbar on the bottom. It not only looks like the taskbar you’d have on a PC but also brings over most of its functions, including the ability to hover over apps to glance at their active windows, progress bars for entertainment apps like Apple Music and Finder data transfers, a dropdown of essentials shortcuts on one edge and a calendar on the other, the list goes on. Plus, like a Windows taskbar, it takes advantage of the screen’s entire width instead of anchoring in the center.
