Igara: our open source macOS app to organize the Dock

Neto Pompeu —

We spend our days in the macOS Dock. Over time, piling up dozens of apps — design tools, terminals, browsers, messaging, editing software — it ends up cluttered. macOS offers no native way to group these icons. So we created the tool we were missing: Igara.

Igara is a small macOS application, free and open source, that organizes the icons in your Dock into visual groups separated by spaces. We first developed it for our daily use at the studio, then decided to publish it: if it saves us time, it can save time for others as well.

What Igara does

  • Visual groups in the Dock: Design, Development, Communication, Video… each app family is separated by a space for easy recognition at a glance.
  • Automatic categorization: Igara recognizes your apps and offers an initial organization with one click, which you can then adjust.
  • Drag and drop: rearrange your apps within a group or from one group to another; the order is applied directly to the Dock.
  • Discreet: Igara lives in the menu bar, without an additional icon in the Dock. It only acts when you ask it to.

Why open source — and for whom

At Primo Studio, a creative and development studio based in French Guiana, we build many internal tools to streamline our daily work. Igara is part of these in-house building blocks. We keep it simple, lightweight, without unnecessary dependencies.

But a good internal tool has no reason to stay locked away. Igara is therefore published open source on GitHub: you are free to download, use, improve, or get inspired by it. No registration, no data collection, no cost. This is our way to give back a little to the open source community whose software benefits us every day — from French Guiana to mainland France and beyond.

The technical stack

Igara is deliberately minimalist and 100% native. No heavy framework, no embedded runtime: just enough to do the job cleanly.

  • Swift & SwiftUI for the interface, inside a menu bar app (MenuBarExtra) that remains outside the Dock.
  • AppKit to interact with the system and manipulate the Dock.
  • Reading and writing the Dock via macOS preferences (com.apple.dock): Igara reads your list of apps, inserts separators between groups, then smoothly reloads the Dock — without making it "blink."
  • Zero external dependencies: everything relies on Apple frameworks. The app weighs barely over one megabyte.
  • Quality: a suite of unit tests (XCTest) covers group logic, persistence, and categorization. The code is organized to remain readable and contributive.
  • Serious distribution: the app is signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate then notarized by Apple, so it installs without Gatekeeper warnings, like any trusted app. Compatible with macOS 14 and later, universal binary (Apple Silicon + Intel).

This is exactly the stack we use for our macOS and iOS apps at the studio: Swift, SwiftUI, AppKit, Xcode, Swift Package Manager, Apple signing and notarization. Igara is a good small-scale showcase of our way of working.

Where the name "Igara" comes from

"Igara" means canoe in Tupi, the language of the Amazonian peoples — the root of the word "igarapé," those waterways winding through the forest. A nod to our territory, the Amazonian French Guiana, and the idea of navigating between the groups in your Dock like a canoe between creeks.

Download and contribute

Igara is available for free on GitHub. Download the latest version, open an issue if you have an idea, or submit a pull request: the project is open.

And if you’re looking for a development studio in French Guiana to design a custom macOS, iOS, or web app, let's talk.

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Igara is part of the projects of our Lab: the tools, experiments, and open source contributions from Primo Studio.