Applebara

A ~18 MB app launcher for macOS. Hit a hotkey, type two letters, launch an app. That's it.

Why

macOS Spotlight keeps a full-content search index alive so you can launch apps with ⌘Space. On a quiet machine that's ~1 GB of resident mds_stores plus constant background indexing — to do a job that, if all you want is launching apps from /Applications, needs almost none of it.

Applebara does that one job. Its real (private) memory footprint is about 18 MB — roughly 50× smaller than the index it replaces — and it does zero background work when idle.

What it does

• Hotkey → search field. Nothing shows until you type 2 letters (no clutter, no history, no telemetry).
• Row of 4 app icons, fuzzy-matched against /Applications, /System/Applications, and ~/Applications.
• ↓ expands to a list of 10. ←/→ (or ↑/↓ in the list) to move, Enter to launch, Esc to back out.
• Lives in the menu bar (🦫), no Dock icon.

Build

./build.sh          # produces Applebara.app (ad-hoc signed, for local use)
open Applebara.app

Requires the Xcode command-line tools (swiftc, sips, iconutil). No Xcode project, no dependencies — it's a single main.swift.

Install & make it your ⌘Space

./install.sh        # build, replace /Applications/Applebara.app, relaunch

Then add it as a Login Item (System Settings → General → Login Items) and click the capybara in the menu bar → Use ⌘Space (replaces Spotlight).

SKIP_BUILD=1 ./install.sh installs the Applebara.app already in the working directory — useful after scripts/notarize.sh, which staples the existing bundle.

That's it. The toggle disables Spotlight's ⌘Space shortcut and rebinds Applebara to it, taking effect immediately — no logout. Click it again to hand ⌘Space back to Spotlight. The hotkey ships as ⌥Space so it works out of the box without colliding with anything.

Optional — once you're no longer using Spotlight, reclaim its index entirely (~1 GB resident, plus all the background indexing):

sudo mdutil -a -i off && sudo mdutil -a -E

To undo: sudo mdutil -a -i on.

Distribution (signed + notarized)

IDENTITY="Developer ID Application: Your Name (TEAMID)" ./build.sh
ditto -c -k --keepParent Applebara.app Applebara.zip
xcrun notarytool submit Applebara.zip --keychain-profile "applebara-notary" --wait
xcrun stapler staple Applebara.app

Store notary credentials once with: xcrun notarytool store-credentials applebara-notary --apple-id <id> --team-id <TEAMID> --password <app-specific-password>

License

MIT — see LICENSE.