~ $ scuttlarr

scuttlarr

Scuttle the ship. Sail the wreck.

An opinionated macOS distro for developers. One command turns a fresh Mac into a fast, quiet, keyboard-first machine — the Liquid Glass scraped off, the Dock parked, windows tiled, one launcher, one menu bar, one theme across everything — and a lifecycle to keep it that way.

$ curl -fsSL https://scuttlarr.com/install | sh

Pre-alpha. The install URL lands with the first release — watch the repo.

What you get

De-shined macOS
Reduced transparency and motion, Stage Manager and Apple tiling off, no desktop icons, Dock parked, Siri gone, no press-and-hold accents, no autocorrect anywhere.
Tiling, launcher, bar
launcharr is the launcher, the menu bar, and owns AeroSpace tiling. Zero granted permissions.
One theme, everywhere
One palette rendered into the terminal, prompt, launcher, bar, borders, wallpaper and the macOS accent. scuttlarr theme set dracula changes all of them.
Caps Lock → Hyper
Esc on tap, a fifth modifier on hold. A whole clean layer of shortcuts nobody else binds.
Default apps, declared
Which app opens .md, .json, .mp4, http:// — one file, applied on install.
A lifecycle
scuttlarr update pulls the base and runs migrations. doctor tells you what drifted. Your overlay survives all of it.

Not a dotfiles manager

Dotfiles are the residue of a person; nobody installs someone else’s. scuttlarr is a base with a lifecycle. The base is read-only and never edited on your machine. Everything of yours lives in ~/.config/scuttlarr/ — extra apps, defaults you flip back, shell fragments, private themes. When the base changes an opinion, a migration ships with it. You don’t write dotfiles; you override a distro.

Principles

  1. 1. Opinionated is the feature. One choice per surface. Alternatives are an overlay, not a config flag.
  2. 2. Raw over shiny. If macOS added it to look nice, it’s off by default.
  3. 3. Zero permissions where possible. No Accessibility, no Full Disk Access for the base install.
  4. 4. Hackable. Shell scripts and plain config files in directories. Read them, fork them, overlay them.
  5. 5. Updatable. A distro you can’t update is a snapshot. Migrations are first-class.