Windows

Everything on this page needs Accessibility, except where it says otherwise. Without it, every running application shows a single dash and one button.

Indicators

Applications with several windows show one dash per window, up to four.

Hovering a button names the window it is showing — the page title rather than the application’s name again — or the application’s name when nothing is open.

The window list

Right-click a running application to list its windows. Minimised ones are indented, and each offers:

Close	Presses the window’s own close button, so an unsaved document still gets to put its sheet up
Minimise / Restore	As you would expect
Quit	The whole application

Close is disabled for a window on another Space that was reached through a menu item, because a menu item has no close button to press.

A button per window

In full-width labelled mode each window gets its own button, titled with the window’s own title — so a Safari button reads the page name rather than “Safari”.

Turn it off with Separate Windows in the Size & Style menu to go back to one button per application.

Window buttons reorder within their own application, and move the whole application when dragged clear of it.

Windows in a full-screen Space

These are a special case, because macOS’s Accessibility API only exposes the windows of the Space you are currently on. Eskele reaches them four ways, best first:

1. An application’s focused or main window comes back from Accessibility even when it is elsewhere.
2. The handle of any full-screen window Eskele has already seen stays usable after the window leaves its Space.
3. The application’s own Window menu lists windows Accessibility will not, with their real titles, and pressing that item crosses the Space. This is the one that works from a cold start.
4. Anything still unaccounted for is counted through the window server and shown as a button named after the application.

Only that last case is approximate.

A window on another Space cannot be found directly

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.

Freshness

Window changes are picked up from Accessibility notifications rather than polling, so opening, closing or renaming a window updates the bar in roughly 200 ms.

Window previews

Window Previews puts a live thumbnail above the hover label — the window itself for a window button, and the application’s focused window for an application cell, which is the same window the label already names.

This is the only feature in Eskele that costs Screen Recording, which is why it is off by default. Without the permission it does nothing at all and the label stays exactly what it has always been: the window’s title, in text. Nothing else in the app changes, and no other feature starts needing it.

Three details:

• The capture is asked for only after the hover delay has elapsed, so sweeping along a full-width bar never captures anything.
• The text appears the moment the delay is up and the thumbnail fills in behind it, so the label stays as quick as it was. A capture stands in for the live window for two seconds, which makes re-hovering the same cell instant.
• Off-screen windows are captured too. A minimised window, or one on another Space, is exactly the case where a picture tells you something the bar cannot.

It uses ScreenCaptureKit rather than the older CGWindowListCreateImage, which is deprecated and, since Sonoma, hands back a placeholder for windows it will not give you.

Applications that are starting or stuck

Two states get diagonal hatching across the cell, in both item styles:

Starting	Neutral stripes, from the moment the application appears until it finishes launching
Not responding	Red stripes

The hatching is drawn over the icon but under the label, so an application’s name and window title stay readable — they are information, and trading them away to report a status the icon can carry is a poor exchange. Hovering says which it is in words, because a stripe colour is a convention you have to have learned.

Starting costs no permission. The application appears on the bar at willLaunch rather than didLaunch, and isFinishedLaunching is what clears it. An application that never reports finishing gives up its stripes after 20 seconds rather than wearing them forever.

Not responding needs Accessibility. An AX read is a synchronous message to the application’s own event loop, so an application that does not answer within the messaging timeout is one that is not pumping it — which is what “not responding” means. It takes two missed reads in a row to be believed: one is not evidence, because a machine under load can starve a healthy application of a 120 ms window, and a tile that flickered at every hiccup is one nobody would trust.

Without the permission every read fails for a reason that says nothing about the application, so nothing is ever flagged.

uBar has a third stripe, restorable, in blue. It has no counterpart here — Eskele already dims a hidden application and draws one dash per window, so the state it would report is one the bar shows already.

Applications that need attention

A bouncing Dock icon is private to the Dock process; nothing can observe it.

What Eskele can see, given Accessibility, is the thing bouncing usually accompanies — an application putting a dialog or a sheet in front of you while you were working somewhere else. Those cells glow amber until you visit the application. Turn it off with Highlight Attention.

An application that only bounces, without putting anything up, will not light up.

Diagnosing

When a window button, the full-screen behaviour, or the attention glow is not doing what you expect:

open -n /Applications/Eskele.app --args --diagnose-windows
cat ~/Library/Application\ Support/Eskele/diagnose-windows.txt

It reports what Accessibility says about every running application: its windows, their subroles, which are full-screen, which are on another Space and how they were reached, which are dialogs, which applications would be flagged as needing attention, and which displays the bar currently considers to be in a full-screen space.

It is read-only — it changes nothing about the applications it inspects. Run it through open rather than from a shell, or you will measure your terminal’s permissions instead of Eskele’s.