Jason Alexander left macOS for Omarchy and is rebuilding his everyday apps under Last Refuge
Notes, mail, a Mission Control-style overview and Google Drive sync: a CEO who spent decades on the Mac is writing the apps he missed, mostly in Rust and GPUI.
Image: Jason Alexander (X)
Switching from macOS usually means hunting for replacements. Jason Alexander is writing his own. “@scottw pointed me at @omarchy last year, and I absolutely love it! It’s my daily driver now!” he wrote on X on October 13, 2026. “I started lastrefuge.ai as my own independent software company to build and ship apps, and just slowly building apps that I love, and that I need as I switch from decades on macOS.”
This is not a weekend hacker with time to spare. In the same thread, Alexander explained that Concord was sold in December 2024, then: “I retired in January 2025… and failed. lol!” Bessemer “head-hunted me onto the Board of Mortgage Automator in July, and September asked me to take over as CEO,” he wrote. His X bio now reads “CEO @ Automator”.
And the switch is real. “I travel to Toronto every other week for work. This is my first week leaving my Mac at home and rolling straight with my XPS and Omarchy. It feels goooood,” he posted on October 18.
One gap was notes. “As I move from macOS to Omarchy, I’d been missing a simple, native notes app. I built one, and just recently rewrote it to Rust and GPUI (I freaking love GPUI),” Alexander said on October 14. Omarchy Notes is now at version 1.1.0 and MIT licensed. According to the README, it keeps local, offline notes with no account, offers checklists, tables, folders, Quick Note and a CLI capture command, and installs on Omarchy with a one-line curl script that hands the package to pacman. The old Qt version is retired. The README also notes the app is “not affiliated with Apple or the Omarchy project.”
Mail was another, and for a CEO it is the one app that cannot be compromised. “Big updates to Overlook, my Rust/GPUI client for Omarchy/Linux! This has been my daily driver for me,” he wrote on October 14, explaining that he lives in his inbox, so email had to work well before he could make the full-time jump to Omarchy. Overlook is a Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Contacts client for people who “liked the way New Outlook works”, with a Focused Inbox, offline queueing and a full calendar. For now you connect it with your own Google OAuth client, as Alexander said he was “waiting on them to approve the OAuth”. The README lists IMAP, SMTP and POP3 as built but still beta, and the project status as “early daily use”. Note that Overlook is not open source yet: its source is published “for transparency and review”, with “a license for redistribution” still to be chosen.
On October 19 he went after a macOS feature he used every day. “This weekend’s project was continuing to gap-fill from macOS for features and functionality I used every day… this time was Mission Control. Introducing Orbit!” he announced, adding that it is “written in Rust and GPUI so it’s super fast and responsive!” Orbit opens a full-screen overview with Super+` or an optional hot corner, shows every window as a live card, searches windows, apps and workspaces as you type, and lets you drag windows between workspaces. Orbit is MIT licensed, and its README says it is “built for Omarchy and works on any Hyprland 0.56 session”.
The latest piece is cloud storage. “And, Aerie is born! Full Google Drive access and syncing to your local file system in Linux/Omarchy,” Alexander posted on October 21, describing it as built in his “usual favorite of Rust and GPUI”. The Aerie README tells a different story on the stack, describing a native app “built with Rust, GTK4 and libadwaita”. Either way, it syncs chosen My Drive folders both ways through a small background service, is MIT licensed, and is “in early development”. Until Google approves his OAuth client, you need to bring your own.
All of it lives under Last Refuge, whose tagline is “Independent software for new frontiers.” The site lists seven projects so far, including three more: Pipkin, a desktop client for the Pi coding agent, Omarchy Calendar, and Facet, a hardware explorer for Linux. One by one, Alexander is filling the holes that keep Mac users from making Omarchy their only machine, and he is shipping the source along the way.
