What perch is
A shelf that drops out of the notch mid-drag to catch whatever you're carrying. Native, quiet, and it never touches your originals.
You know the dance: drag a file, realise the window you wanted is buried under four others, let go, dig it out, drag again.
perch ends it. Start dragging anything, flick up to the notch, and a small shelf drops down to catch it. Pile in as much as you like, from as many places as you like. Then grab any tile and carry the whole group to its real home in one motion.
It has no Dock icon and asks for no permissions. It sees what you drop on it, and nothing else.
These pages are the manual. The perch page is the short version: one screen, the dance, and the install command.
What it holds
Files, folders, Photos exports, images dragged out of Safari, links and plain text all land in the same shelf. Take one tile or grab the stack and take the lot; whatever the destination accepts leaves the shelf, and a refused drop springs back.
It hands out copies. perch stages its own copy of whatever you drop and hands out copies of that. It never moves, renames, edits or deletes the thing you dragged in, so an interrupted drag cannot lose data. A tile only appears once its copy has finished, so nothing on the shelf is half-written and quitting doesn't lose it.
What it doesn't do
- No permissions. No Accessibility, no Input Monitoring, no Screen Recording, no Dock icon.
- No telemetry. Nothing about your files is ever written to a log.
- Nearly offline. The only thing perch sends to the internet is an hourly look at its own release tag, and Settings turns that off. It also listens on your own network for an iPhone you paired yourself, encrypted end to end and off in Settings if you don't want it.
Questions
Where do my files live? Where they already were. perch keeps its copies inside its own sandbox container, and it only ever knows about the things you dragged onto it. The privacy policy is the whole story, and it's shorter than this page.
What licence? Every line of perch is public and readable on GitHub, and each release becomes Apache-2.0 two years after it ships. Until then you may read it, change it and build it for yourself; what you may not do is turn it into a competing product or hand out your own builds of it. That's fair source, and it's the honest version of "mostly open".
Another shelf app? There are others, and they're good. perch's angle is dependability and restraint: copies rather than moves, no permissions to grant, no telemetry, and a shelf that lives where your hand already is.
Inside a haus machine
perch runs perfectly well on its own, and that is how most people meet it. It is also a room in haus, the macOS layer, where it is installed and kept current with the rest of the machine, and where it can hand its light/dark polarity to macOS. Standalone and in-the-house are the same app; only the wiring differs. See the Shelf room.