The Mac doesn’t have a Start menu like Windows, but that hasn’t always been entirely true. In the 90s, Macs offered a list of applications in the Apple menu, like this:
Credit: Justin Pot via InfiniteMac.org
It’s just a distant memory at this point – it’s been 25 years – so we probably shouldn’t count on Apple to bring this feature back. The good news: A free app called XMenu, which I found through App Addict, more or less brings this feature back. In some ways, it’s actually better than the vintage option.
Load XMenu and a single menu bar icon, which looks like the Mac apps icon, will be added. You can click it to browse your Applications folder.
Credit: Justin Pot
It’s not a perfect Start menu replacement, especially if you have a lot of apps, but you can organize things a bit. All apps contained in folders will appear as a submenu, which means you can organize things a bit by placing apps in particular folders in the Finder.
Credit: Justin Pot
You can also add more icons in settings. Your Documents and Home folders are supported, which means you can use it to browse all your files.
Credit: Justin Pot
There’s also support for the Developer folder and Snippets, if you’re the kind of user who uses them, as well as a user-defined folder that you can fill with whatever you want. You can create an alias of any folder in Finder by right-clicking and then clicking Create an alias. You can drag different aliases ~/Library/Application Support/XMenu/Custom to create your own personalized menu including all the folders that interest you most. It takes a little more time, sure, but it will work exactly as you want.
