Tuck
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Licence, credits and where Tuck comes from

Tuck stands on the work of two other projects. Here is what the licence allows, who built what, and how to check what you install.

Updated

The licence

Tuck is licensed under GPL-3.0, and the core app is free. Anyone who receives Tuck is entitled to its complete source under GPL-3.0; how the source is delivered will be published with the first release. You may build it, modify it and share it under the licence. Read the terms page and the full GPL-3.0 text.

The lineage

  1. Ice by Jordan Baird: the free, GPL-3.0 menu bar manager this family started from.
  2. Thaw: a maintained fork of Ice, also GPL-3.0. Tuck forks Thaw’s development branch.
  3. Tuck: forked on 3 October 2026 at Thaw commit 986471fd. The changes so far are the rebrand: name, icon, bundle identifier, URL scheme and command-line helper. The notice of modifications ships with the app.

Much of what Tuck does today comes from Ice’s and Thaw’s authors and contributors. Tuck is not a claim to have invented it, and it does not borrow Thaw’s release history, badges or user counts. Translations are by volunteers, credited in the repository’s CREDITS file.

How to verify a build

The first release is launching soon. Here are the checks the project documents. Run them on the file you download, not on this page’s word.

  1. Copy the Tuck app out of the disk image, then run the Gatekeeper check below. A notarized build should pass and show a Developer ID Application certificate.
  2. Check the signature details and the team identifier against the one published with the release.
  3. For the disk image itself, the project plans a Sigstore signature, build provenance and a software bill of materials. The verification commands will be published with the first release.
spctl --assess --type execute -v /Applications/Tuck.app
xcrun stapler validate /Applications/Tuck.app
codesign --verify --deep --strict --verbose=2 /Applications/Tuck.app
codesign -dv --verbose=4 /Applications/Tuck.app 2>&1 | rg 'Authority|TeamIdentifier|Timestamp'

The release verification guide will identify the expected signer and update key. Compare those values with the installer itself. A valid code signature and a notarization result are separate checks; neither can be inferred from the other.

The public DMG is launching soon. Signing and notarization results are pending publication with that file.

Website credits

This website runs on Cloudflare Workers and reuses Astro 7.3.5, @astrojs/cloudflare 14.3.3 and @astrojs/sitemap 3.7.4 (MIT), deployed with wrangler 4.147.0 (MIT or Apache-2.0). The home page’s scroll reveal and card glow follow design patterns from Aceternity UI (Container Scroll Animation, Glowing Effect), rebuilt here in CSS under the Aceternity licence. The home hero follows Watermelon UI hero-16 (MIT licence, Copyright (c) 2026 Watermelon Platform Contributors), rebuilt in CSS. The typeface is Inter by Rasmus Andersson, self-hosted from @fontsource-variable/inter 5.3.0 under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. The logo marquee and the live feature tiles follow Magic UI patterns (Marquee, Bento Grid; MIT licence), rebuilt in CSS and plain JavaScript. Icons are Lucide 1.52 (ISC licence) and app marks are Simple Icons 16.34 (CC0 1.0), both drawn into the pages at build time; the marks belong to their owners and only show the kind of menu bar apps Tuck can hide, with no affiliation. Their licence files remain in the installed packages and the site source. No additional UI library is needed for native links, buttons, forms and disclosure elements.

Build it from source

You need macOS 26 and Xcode. The source and build instructions will be delivered with the first release, under GPL-3.0. Reading the code is a fair way to decide whether to grant Accessibility.