perch

A shelf in the notch.

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.

Install

brew install --cask hausfold/tap/perch

Prefer a download? The latest release is the same build — signed with our Apple Developer ID and notarized, so it opens straight away with no Gatekeeper prompt and no quarantine hack.

One setting to turn off

In System Settings ▸ Desktop & Dock, turn off “Drag windows to top of screen to enter Mission Control”. macOS arms that top-edge trigger for the whole of any drag — files included — and it fires over the same band the shelf lives in. Leave it on and the Dock steals the drop. It's the only thing perch asks of your Mac.

What it looks like

the shelf, mid-drag
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a full shelf
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carrying the lot out
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How it behaves

drop
files, folders, Photos exports, images dragged out of Safari, links and plain text all land in the same shelf
carry
take one tile or grab the stack and take the lot; whatever the destination accepts leaves the shelf, and a refused drop springs back
copies
perch stages its own copy and hands out copies. It never moves, renames, edits or deletes the thing you dropped in — an interrupted drag cannot lose data
patience
a tile only appears once its copy has finished. Nothing on the shelf is half-written, and quitting doesn't lose it
quiet
no Dock icon, no Accessibility, no Input Monitoring, no Screen Recording, no telemetry. Nothing about your files is ever written to a log
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

What it needs

macOS 14
or newer. A notch is nice, not required — the shelf works on any Mac and on any display
nothing else
no account and no sign-in. Perch asks for none of the permissions that make a Mac app feel invasive — no Accessibility, no Input Monitoring, no Screen Recording

Perch also has a room in the nebelhaus desktop, where it's installed and kept up to date with the rest of the house. Standalone and in-the-house are the same app.

Questions

fair source
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”
my files
they stay where they are. Perch keeps its copies inside its own sandbox container, and it only ever knows about the things you dragged onto it
a 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

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