The Mac doesn’t have a start menu like Windows, but that wasn’t always entirely true. In the ’90s, Macs offered a list of applications in the Apple Menu, like this:
Credit: Justin Pot via InfiniteMac.org
That’s 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 application called XMenu, which I found via App Addict, brings this feature back, more or less. In some ways it’s actually better than the vintage option.
Load XMenu and a single menu bar icon, which looks like the Mac Applications icon, will be added. You can click this 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 little. Any applications that in are folders will show up as a sub-menu, meaning you can organize things a little by putting applications into particular folders within Finder.
Credit: Justin Pot
You can also add more icons in the settings. There’s support for your Documents and Home folder, meaning you can use this to browse all of your files.
Credit: Justin Pot
There’s also support for the Developer and Snippets folder, if you’re the kind of user who uses those, and a User-Defined folder which you can fill with whatever you want. You can create an alias of any folder in Finder by right-clicking and then clicking Create Alias. You can drag various aliases over ~/Library/Application Support/XMenu/Custom to build your own custom menu that includes all the folders you care about most. It takes a little more time, granted, but it will work exactly the way you want.