GitHub - palamim/starboard: A terminal that's always beside your Dock — not a Quake-style hotkey overlay, a permanent fixture

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Latest release

A terminal that's just always there — not summoned, not dismissed.

Starboard lives permanently beside your macOS Dock: on screen, on every desktop, all the time. There's no hotkey to call it up and no window to find, resize, or alt-tab back to, because it never goes away in the first place.

Starboard demo

What it does

  • Sits directly beside the Dock, tracking its height and position live.
  • Visible on every Space, including over full-screen apps — never steals focus from whatever app you're in.
  • A real, persistent shell (zsh -l) — cd, history, and state carry over between commands, not a one-shot command runner.
  • Its own dark look and a muted, nautical ANSI color palette.
  • Cmd+E expands it to full screen height for when Dock-height isn't enough, then Cmd+E again to snap back.

Download

Homebrew

brew tap palamim/starboard https://github.com/palamim/starboard
brew install --cask palamim/starboard/starboard

The tap lives in this repo, so brew tap needs the full URL — the short form only works for repos named homebrew-*. (Starboard can't go in the official homebrew/cask tap, which now requires notarized builds.)

Homebrew saves you the download, the mv, and the updates — brew upgrade picks up each new release. It doesn't skip the approval steps below, though: a brew-installed copy hits Gatekeeper like any other download.

Manual

Grab the latest build from Releases, then:

unzip Starboard.zip
mv Starboard.app /Applications/
open /Applications/Starboard.app

First launch

However you installed it, the build is ad-hoc signed and not notarized, so the first launch takes a few extra clicks:

  1. Opening it is blocked outright ("Starboard" Not Opened) — click Done.
  2. System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway next to the Starboard entry.
  3. Confirm Open Anyway again, then enter your password.
  4. Starboard launches, but an Accessibility prompt appears — click Open System Settings and enable Starboard, so it can track the Dock.

To have it launch automatically at login: System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions → + → select Starboard.app. That's it — no script needed for either install above.

Updating in place — overwriting the same /Applications/Starboard.app, which is what brew upgrade does too — needs a fresh Accessibility grant, since each release is signed differently. But it may not visibly ask: System Settings can keep showing Starboard as already granted while it silently isn't, and re-checking that same box doesn't fix it. If Starboard stops tracking the Dock after an update, remove the Starboard entry from System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility (select it, −) or run tccutil reset Accessibility com.starboard.app, then relaunch Starboard to get a fresh prompt. See CLAUDE.md for why, and for what to do if you also have a build-from-source copy installed via scripts/install.sh.

Build from source

Run it once:

swift build
.build/debug/Starboard

Run at login (packages and code-signs a .app, registers it as a LaunchAgent):

Stop / start / remove:

launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.starboard.app.plist   # stop
launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.starboard.app.plist     # start
scripts/uninstall.sh                                              # remove entirely

Logs: ~/Library/Logs/Starboard.log

See CLAUDE.md for why building from source needs this script (rather than Login Items) to keep Accessibility permission across rebuilds.

How this differs from Quake-style terminals

Guake, Yakuake, tilda, iTerm2's hotkey window, Ghostty's quick terminal — these summon a terminal with a hotkey, hand it focus, and dismiss it again when you're done. Starboard has no hotkey, never takes focus, and has no summon/dismiss cycle — it's just sitting there, the way the Dock itself is. That's the point: run a command in whatever project you're in, then go straight back to the editor, without switching apps or losing your place.

Requirements

  • macOS 13+
  • Accessibility permission (prompted on first launch) — used to read the Dock's live position. Starboard still works without it, just pinned to a fixed corner instead of hugging the Dock.
  • Starboard follows the Dock across displays — move it to another monitor and Starboard re-glues itself there within a second. With an auto-hiding Dock, it conceals and reveals right along with it, except while you're actively using it (typing into it, or expanded), so it never vanishes or gets yanked out from under you mid-keystroke. Only a left/right Dock stays unsupported — it falls back to a fixed corner on the Dock's own screen instead. See CLAUDE.md for the detection details.

Security & trust

Starboard makes no network requests and collects no data — there's nothing in the source that could, since it's under 700 lines across 4 Swift files, worth reading yourself rather than taking on faith. The one sensitive-looking permission it asks for, Accessibility, is used for exactly one thing: reading the Dock's on-screen position so the panel can sit next to it.

Known issues

  • Pasted text briefly renders in the wrong color until the next keypress.
  • (Previously) some prompt glyphs rendered as ? during live redraws — hasn't recurred recently.

See CLAUDE.md for architecture, design decisions, and the full write-up on both issues above.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.