BuhoLaunchpad — Mac download

You swipe four fingers down on your trackpad, and a clean, full-screen grid of your applications fills the display. That’s the core of BuhoLaunchpad.

Grid layout — Shows every installed app as a familiar icon grid, replacing the standard macOS Launchpad with a snappier alternative.

Folders — Drag one icon onto another to create a group. Version 1.10.2 adds an Ungroup option to the context menu for splitting them back apart.

Gesture control — Call it up with a four- or five-finger trackpad swipe. Navigate with arrow keys, scroll wheel, or mouse clicks.

Search — Start typing to filter the grid to a single matching app.

Layout backup — Save your icon arrangement and restore it later, so a clean reinstall doesn’t mean reorganizing everything from scratch.

Claims one gesture, leaves Spotlight and Dock untouched

BuhoLaunchpad works beside — not against — the rest of macOS. Spotlight stays intact. The Dock stays pinned. The app launcher simply claims one gesture, leaving trackpad pinch-to-zoom, three-finger drag and Mission Control untouched.

Drag an app out of the grid and drop it onto a Finder window or a Mail message to share a file path. The launcher reads your Applications folder live, so a fresh .app added to /Applications appears without a restart. If you keep a tightly grouped Launchpad layout for daily work and want to experiment, export the backup file before reorganizing. That file lives in your Documents folder — portable across machines running the same build.

Grid draws in a single frame, search filters on the first keystroke

On both Apple Silicon and Intel hardware, the grid renders without lag. Swiping into the launcher feels immediate; icon tiles draw in a single frame. Search filters the grid on the first keystroke, no spinner.

Memory use stays modest. During a full workday with the launcher open intermittently, its background process rarely pushes past 90 MB of RAM. CPU draw is flat when idle. The 1.10.2 release fixed a crash triggered by repeated Finder renames, and the app hasn’t beachballed once in testing since. If you last tried buholaunchpad 1.8.1 for mac and set it aside because of a rare gesture conflict, version 1.10.2 resolves that class of instability. For anyone who grabbed buholaunchpad 1.8.5 for mac on an older build, the current gesture engine handles rapid swipes more predictably.

• macOS 11 or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel 64-bit