Known gaps

Each of these is here with its reason, so you can tell a decision from a limit before filing a bug.

Walls in macOS

The bar cannot reserve space inside a native full-screen space. macOS reserves nothing there except for the menu bar. Reserved-space mode covers maximised windows; for full-screen the bar can only float over the window or get out of the way.

Full-screen detection needs Accessibility. There is no reliable permission-free way to tell a full-screen space from a window merely sized to fill the screen. Without the permission the setting behaves as Always Show.

A window on another Space cannot be found directly. Accessibility only exposes the current Space’s windows. Eskele works around it four ways, so the gap is only a window Eskele has never had in view — that one can be counted and shown, but clicking it can only activate its application, which is all the real Dock manages too.

A badge set before Eskele launched is missing until it next changes. Badges are read off the Dock’s own tiles, and Eskele restarts the Dock to hide it; macOS does not re-push a badge to the new Dock process. A badge that is not a number — a bare dot — has no number to draw. See Badges.

A file operation cannot be attributed to the application doing it. macOS publishes the file, the fraction and the kind of operation, and nothing that names the publisher — so Eskele shows these on the destination folder’s cell rather than on the application’s. See Progress.

Now Playing cannot be read without asking the player. The system’s own interface for it has needed a private entitlement since macOS 15.4. Media progress therefore costs an Automation consent per player, and is off until you ask for it. Only Music, Spotify and VLC expose a scriptable position at all.

A bouncing Dock icon cannot be detected. requestUserAttention goes to the Dock privately. Eskele highlights the dialogs and sheets that usually accompany it, which needs Accessibility, but an application that only bounces will not light up.

Safari’s tabs do not count towards Safari. WebKit’s content processes are parented to launchd, so nothing in the process tree connects them. macOS knows the answer and only exposes it privately. See Activity.

Counting the Trash without Full Disk Access is an estimate, derived from the directory’s own metadata. It agrees with Finder on APFS; on a volume laid out differently Eskele reports nothing rather than guessing.

There is no Lock Screen. The CGSession binary every recipe names is gone from macOS 26, and the call that replaced it is private. Sleeping the display is not the same thing and would be a lie.

Emptying the Trash asks Finder to do it, and the power actions ask loginwindow. No public API exists for either, so both raise the system Automation prompt on first use.

Decisions

Not sandboxed, so this can never ship on the Mac App Store while it controls the Dock.

A shortcut another app already uses cannot be detected. macOS accepts the registration either way, so a recorded shortcut is checked against macOS’s own and Eskele’s others, not against other apps’. See Recording a shortcut.

No custom clock dials. uBar’s timepieces are folders of PNGs described by a plist; a plug-in format with one implementation is a file layout to maintain rather than a feature. The dial is drawn from the current appearance’s own colours. See Clock.

No blue “restorable” stripe. uBar has one. Eskele already dims a hidden application and draws one dash per window, so the state it would report is one the bar shows already.

Custom icons come from a folder, not a picker. Pinned folders and files are not listed there either, because a path is not a filename — Finder’s own Get Info ▸ paste an icon already overrides those. See Appearance.

Not built yet

Releases are Apple silicon only, by choice. swift build builds for the Mac it runs on, and GitHub’s macOS runners are Apple silicon. The appcast says so, so an Intel Mac is never offered an update it cannot run.

Only the DMG carries a stapled ticket, not the app inside it. Gatekeeper accepts the app copied out of it by asking Apple online, which is how it is normally first opened — a Mac that is offline the first time Eskele opens would refuse it.

VoiceOver has been built for, not yet listened to. What the bar tells VoiceOver — each item’s role, name, state and actions, in bar order — is tested, and so is the keyboard reaching the bar. Nobody has yet heard VoiceOver read the bar. See From the keyboard.