Mac Desktop UI on Windows? Try Seelen

As some of you know, I recently ended a 2-year experiment of diving into the Apple ecosystem… whole hog: MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone, AirPods. As of yesterday, only the AirPods remained in my house. I’m now on Windows (I’ll blog about why not Linux at some point), but there were some things about the Mac desktop UI I missed, such as the dock at the bottom and the title bar at the top.

Enter Seelen UI…

It’s rather Mac-like, as you can see. It adds some features I don’t use, but having the app dock at the bottom and info at the top… It makes the pain of switching back a little easier. Things are where I’ve gotten used to them being… for the most part.

Lining up your auto-arranged desktop icons to the right isn’t a feature yet. About the only other thing I’d wish for is being able to combine pinned apps into folders like on Android or iOS. On Mac, I was able to do that with an odd workaround where I created a directory of folders, put app shortcuts in them, assigned icons to the folders, then put the folders in the dock.

The great thing, though, is that Seelen is open source, free, and has a developer mode, so I could start trying to add either feature if I wanted it badly enough to learn the underlying Windows desktop architecture and Seelen’s architecture and maybe some Rust… I mean that’s one of the attractions of open source: you can rewire it. Whether or not you ever do is another matter, but you can.

I recommend downloading it from their Seelen UI releases page on Github. That’s updated more regularly than the Microsoft Windows Store version and if you can even figure out which version is available in the store please tell me. I originally installed the store version, but found a bug, and the solution was to upgrade to the latest release from Github.

The current release (as of this writing) is 2.20, which released two days ago.

I’m liking it as it is and looking forward to future updates. Try it out today.