Aeronaut Is an Actual Mac App for Bluesky

Twitter never really clicked for me until 2011, when the company launched its first Mac app. Something about moving the timeline outside the browser and into a small dedicated window just clicked for me. That way I could find links, open them in my main window, and go back to the side window to talk about it with people. And the keyboard shortcuts meant I could do this quickly, without touching my mouse.

The Twitter Mac app, like most good things about the social network currently called X, is a distant memory. But Bluesky doesn't really have an official Mac app, which may be why I constantly forget to check it.

That's why I was happy to find Aeronaut, a beautiful Mac application by indie developer Mikey Clarke that puts Bluesky in its own window on the desktop. If you loved the original Twitter for Mac, or the much-beloved third-party Tweetbot, this is the Bluesky application you've been waiting for.

Aeronaut condenses your Bluesky timeline into a narrow window. There are buttons on the side for your various feeds, from home to mentions to things like your bookmarks. You can scroll through posts using your mouse, if you want, or by using the arrow keys. Click an image or video and it will open in a larger window, allowing you to see more detail.

There is support for browsing both your Following feed, which is reverse chronological, and the algorithm-driven Discover feed. And there's support for logging into multiple Bluesky accounts, which is great for anyone who runs both a personal and a brand account.

The keyboard shortcuts, sadly, aren't exactly the same as the ones used by Twitter a decade and a half ago, but they're easy enough to learn if you check the menu bar. (Command-R for reply, Command-L to like, and Command-T to repost are just a few.)

Aeronaut also supports notifications, which is useful if you've been regularly finding replies to your posts days after the fact, like I've been. I appreciate that you can configure which kinds of notifications you want—I generally only want to be notified if someone says something to me and not when they quickly press the like button. And you can have different notification settings for different Bluesky accounts.

What ties everything together, though, is the polish. This application makes Bluesky fit right in with the other windows on my Mac desktop, which is exactly what I wanted.

There are a few things that this application decidedly is not. There's no support for multiple columns, meaning you can't use it as an alternative to the Tweetdeck of yore. There's no simple way I could find for creating a thread. And Aeronaut is also not completely free.

The application offers a free version, which lets you can scroll through your feed and like or repost things. If you want to write posts, or reply to posts, you'll need to pay for a subscription, which costs $2 per month. It's yet another subscription, granted, but it supports the development of an application that likely couldn't exist otherwise. If you, like me, prefer your microposts in a small window, that price might be worth it.