Imperator DockFolders

// Overview

Group the apps you actually use into a folder, put that folder in the Dock, and click it to get a grid of those apps. Not a Finder stack of aliases — a real popup you lay out yourself: your own order, your own labels, your own grid size, paged if you want more than fits.

macOS lets you drag a folder to the right side of the Dock and get a stack. DockFolders puts your folders on the left side among the real apps, gives each one a generated icon showing what is inside, and opens a keyboard-dismissable popup anchored to the Dock icon.

// Requirements

Requires macOS 14 or later, Apple silicon. Built and tested on macOS 26 only — older versions are expected to work but have not been verified.

Install at your own risk. The app is not notarized and carries no Apple Developer signature, so macOS cannot vouch for it. It is provided as is, with no warranty, under the MIT license.

// Install

1. Download the zip from Releases and unpack it.
2. Drag Imperator DockFolders.app into /Applications. It has to live there — the launcher bundles start the app by bundle identifier, and Launch Services resolves that most reliably from /Applications.
3. The app is signed with a self-signed certificate, not an Apple Developer ID, and it is not notarized. Gatekeeper will block the first launch. Right-click the app and choose Open, then confirm. If macOS still refuses:

1. Launch it and grant Accessibility when asked. See below for exactly what that is for.

// Permissions

DockFolders asks for one system permission, and it degrades gracefully without it. Here is every permission-relevant thing the app does, and why.

Accessibility — asked for, optional

System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility

macOS prompts for this on first launch. Accessibility is used for two things, both about your own Dock clicks:

• Reading the screen position of your folder's icon in the Dock, so the popup can be anchored to it with the little arrow pointing at the right tile.
• A listen-only mouse-click tap that lets the app react to a click on one of its own Dock tiles instantly (~15ms) instead of waiting for macOS to spawn the launcher (~100ms). The tap sees mouse button events only — never keystrokes — observes them without altering anything, and the click is only acted on when it lands on one of the app's own Dock folder tiles.

That is all it does with Accessibility. It does not read other apps' windows, does not observe keystrokes, and does not control other applications.

If you deny it: everything still works. Clicks are served by the launcher path (~100ms) and the popup falls back to the mouse position captured at click time, which for a Dock click is within a few pixels of the icon anyway. You can grant it later, or never.

macOS remembers this grant against the app's code signature. DockFolders ships signed with a stable self-signed certificate specifically so the grant survives updates — reinstalling a newer build does not make you re-tick the box.

Not asked for, and not needed

To be explicit, since these are the ones people worry about:

Where it writes

Everything the app owns lives in one directory:

Your folders, the symlinks to your apps, the per-folder layout config, and the generated launcher bundles. Deleting that directory resets the app completely.

Outside of that, the app writes to exactly two places:

• com.apple.dock preferences — adds and removes its launcher bundles from the Dock's persistent-apps array. It only ever touches entries pointing at its own launchers.
• /tmp/dockfolders_open — a one-line handoff file. A launcher writes the folder name and the mouse position there, posts a Darwin notification, and the app reads the file and deletes it immediately.

Login item — only if you turn it on

Settings → General → Open at login registers the app with SMAppService. It shows up in System Settings → General → Login Items like any other, and the toggle removes it. Off by default.

// Use

• Menu bar icon (grid symbol) opens the folder list. Turn it off in Settings if you prefer the main window only.
• New folder in the main window, then Add apps to pick from everything installed.
• Double-click a folder name or an app label to rename it. Custom labels are yours and stay put; the underlying app is untouched.
• Drag apps to reorder. The folder icon regenerates to match.
• Grid controls set columns and items per page. More apps than fit means pages.
• Swipe horizontally on a trackpad inside the popup to page through.
• Add to Dock builds a launcher bundle with the generated icon and drops it into the Dock.
• Escape or a click anywhere outside closes the popup.

Apps are added as symlinks, not copies and not Finder aliases. Nothing is duplicated on disk and nothing is moved.

// Build

Requires Xcode. Note the DEVELOPER_DIR prefix — a Command Line Tools–only setup cannot build this.

Two build phases matter:

• Build mousepos Helper compiles MouseLocation/main.swift into Contents/MacOS/mousepos. A copy of this binary is the executable inside every generated launcher bundle: it captures the mouse position, writes the handoff file and signals the app, all in one process, which is what keeps a Dock click fast. It is compiled here, at build time, on purpose: compiling it on the user's Mac would need swiftc, which is an xcode-select shim that pops the "Install Command Line Developer Tools" dialog on a machine without Xcode.
• Code Sign signs the bundle with the self-signed Imperator Dev identity. That identity is what makes the Accessibility grant survive an update. Building without it in your keychain works, but every new build will ask for Accessibility again.

Deploy over an existing install with rm -rf first — a plain cp -R will not replace the old bundle:

// Third-party

None. SwiftUI and AppKit only, no package dependencies, no vendored code.