I switched to HiddenBar a few years ago when a Bartender licence ran out. It's open source, it's free, and it hasn't been taken over by a new owner who won't identify themselves. https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden
Sadly it's as good as not functional (it doesn't even begin to work on my Mac). I used to use https://github.com/Mortennn/Dozer and that also started misbehaving (and now the shortcut won't work). I used hidden's fork as well which also doesn't work. Ice doesn't work either. All of these apps are abandoned.
What isn't working for you? I've been using it for years and have no issues on the most recent versions of macOS. I don't use much of the functionality though, really only just use it to hide icons I don't care about.
Hidden Bar is working on my M1 Max MBP 16" with macOS 14.5. Not an option for me because it can't handle the notch, but the basic functionality works.
Ice ( https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice ) also works, although it's still missing a lot of stuff and also still doesn't have anything to work around the notch. It's being updated though.
If no app works, then it might be something to do with your setup? Maybe some app you use or some change you've made? Very annoying in any case.
MacBook M1 Pro 2021 model 16 inch. Not working. For me nothing works and yes it anyway doesn't handle the notch. In case of Ice it didn't work in first 2 goes and then I gave up because I kind of felt weird that it uses accessibility permission workaround, kinda.
No idea what I changed. When I install back Dozer it starts working fine (with Shortcut not working). Then if I have to uninstall the Dozer I clear all files related to it using AppCleaner. So I guess that doesn't interfere either.
I will maybe debug it one of these days when I have some time.
Very weird. Someone else replied to my comment saying that Ice was working too, so it doesn't seem to be a widespread problem. Hope you manage to fix that.
I am now using Ice based on this post and it works, for me, as a drop-in replacement, aside from being able to pick what is permanently showing (wifi, primarily). I uninstalled Bartender after 10-12 years and am happily using this.
If I wanted to poison update a bunch of developers who likely work at major US tech companies, this is exactly the type of software I would target for "purchase".
My first license was from 2015. This is one of the most important utilities I install on all my Macs. I'm sad to see this apparently (and appearance is all that really counts at a moment like this) shifty behavior from the new owners. Hope the original dev got a nice payday.
I plan to keep running the app without updating until it breaks or I find something I like better. I hate when beloved software (effectively) goes away.
Its core feature is a non-cosmetic change: it hides the menubar app icons, and then shows them on-demand. The ability to make cosmetic changes to the menubar is a comparatively recent development.
I wonder how widespread the damage to the app's reputation is after this. I've had multiple conversations with people about this today and everyone is moving to alternatives.
As you said, I don't think knowing that Applause (applause.dev) is the acquiring company helps much considering they have no track record of anything as far as I can see, but having a full day of radio silence must have done some considerable damage.
Yeah, we weren't thinking that Bartender had been stolen somehow, which is what this post is mostly addressing. Rather it's a question of whether we can trust the people who've legitimately bought it, particularly given a history of app acquisitions taking things down a shady road.
Surtees had a bunch of accumulated trust from having been maintaining Bartender for over a decade and not having done anything abusive with it in that time. A new developer is starting from scratch there, and the first impression being that they're trying to avoid people knowing about them doesn't make us jump to trusting them. (That's why people are being more inclined to trust random apps from unknowns like Hidden Bar or Ice...)
Man, I love BTT. I've been using it for many years, it's fantastic!
Something that I'd love to have is an easy way to show menu items that aren't visible because there's not enough space in the menu bar. I often have to switch to a different app with fewer text items in the menu bar like Finder, which only has File, Edit, etc., just so I can reach menu bar items that would be otherwise hidden.
Mac OS has a serious problem with requiring loads of third party extensions to get a usable desktop experience. Most of the time it's merely annoying, but this situation also demonstrates that you're placing a lot of trust in the authors of these programs.
Apple is giving you extra pixels, not taking any away.
If you want the same appearance (and resolution) as a non-notch MacBook Pro, open System Settings, go to the Displays section, click Advanced... and toggle on “Show resolutions as list”, save that change, and then enable “Show all resolutions”.
Now select the resolution option just below your current selection. (The y-dimension will be slightly less, which equals the space added by the pixels around the notch.)
Problem was they also massively increased the spacing between menu items, so the amount of menu bar items you can fit before it is a problem has dropped massively from before.
Does it really? For me, finder is below the level of what's acceptable, so I use a replacement. I also use magnet for arranging windows, but apart from that I find the experience far better than windows or linux. Maybe I'm missing out on some really great extensions, which ones would you recommend?
I use SensibleSideButtons and ScrollReverser continually. Those are features which I consider absolutely basic and their omission leaves me cynical.
Rectangle and Contexts are extensions I use to make Mac OS closer to Windows or Linux in comfort, but they're not what I'd consider essential.
An interesting thing happened while I was enumerating the tweaks I had installed. Some of their menu bar icons were hiding under my notch without my even realising! Completely lacking an overflow indication is embarrassingly sloppy, and I might have to grab something like Bartender now too.
My situation is similar to `dwighttk` in the comments you link to, I have stats (as in `brew home stats`) showing CPU/GPU/RAM/Network, then the standard macOs stuff + magnet + weekday and full date and time and nothing is ever hidden by the notch when using the built in display.
So - since people DO have a problem - there must be other things that a lot of users want to see but none of them are mentioned in the link.
Perhaps you don't need to organize icons like other users do.
But for us who do, it is clearly essential.
> "Ugh, this sucks. This app was nearly essential on MacBooks with a notch, since you could hide lesser used icons away to make everything fit." - LeoPanthera 13 hours ago
> "True, but it has been essential for a long time before the notch for those of us with a non-trivial amount of software. The menu bar is a popular spot and so many apps want to put an icon there." - Tagbert 13 hours ago
And that's just from a quick glance.
Most users don't even know it's possible to improve their UI with this third party tool. I bet if they knew it would be considered very important to the mas well.
Specially power users who fight with screen space.
What finder replacement do you use? I have ended up doing just about everything I can via the terminal as finder feels so unusable coming from windows.
There’s a setting to kinda get around having to use apps like this if you’re dealing w the notch. I don’t recall the specific command, but there is a way to shrink the icon spacing to allow more visible icons.
This is what I did too. I don't think I need bartender now. A lot of the cruft can be managed by the control center and there are smart options in the control center and menu bar.
In my habit of sticking to a minimalist and essentialist lifestyle, I've been trying to stay within the Native Apps and reduce third-party apps wherever I can either get rid of or replace them, even if I have to add additional effort.
I've been using Bartender for a very long time. I got rid of it about a year ago. These days, I think and ponder over multiple times before introducing a Menubar App.
- Of course, do I feel the pain if I don't have this one?
- Can this be hidden altogether?
- Is the icon monochrome? Colored icons are outright rejected.
Between the Control Center and the limitations I set for myself, I've survived so far. Let's see where this goes.
This rendered Hidden Bar and Bartender obsolete for me, just reduce icons padding. You can still complement with Hidden Bar. I wish I had written down the original author to give credit:
True, but it has been essential for a long time before the notch for those of us with a non-trivial amount of software. The menu bar is a popular spot and so many apps want to put an icon there.
All these open source alternatives lack something important for macs with notches: a way to see the expanded icons below the menu bar. Without this, icons are hidden by the notch.
You'd expect macOS to properly support the notch after 3 generations of laptops with them, but nope.
I don't develop for Mac, so I'm probably missing something important here, but what is the point of code signing if the owner of the signing key isn't publicly verifiable? Is there not a chain-of-trust back to Apple that can be used to determine who requested the signing key?
There is, kind of. Each developer is identified by a “team ID”, which appears in the Common Name of these certificates. Apple does some validation of the developer’s legal entity, similar to EV SSL.
Interesting. Today I kept getting notifications that “Spotlight” was updated and it was asking me permissions to allow access to its previous version data. I thought that was odd for system service and I kept rejecting it but it kept coming up. I finally clicked except and start looking through my task manager to see if anything was off but everything looked OK so I wasn’t really sure it was going on.
Bartender is installed through SetApp. I wonder if it’s related. I’m going to uninstall reboot and run system scan.
I just tried, wasted five minutes and couldn't for the life of me figure out how to move things out of the (always?) hidden group they're in by default. Eventually found the instruction for it on the issue tracker: https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice/issues/42 While I do remember now that cmd+drag is how you reorder menu bar icons, so that is sort of intuitive for people familiar with the behavior, I haven't done that for years and definitely need a reminder. Seems very strange that the very first nontrivial action isn't documented anywhere (maybe it is but I still don't see it)...
While searching for how to move anything out of hiding, I also landed on https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice/issues/29#issuecomment-19.... Apparently Ice can only hide one segment of the menu bar at once, so if the icons are rearranged for some reason, they can show up in a wrong section. Author promises a future update will fix this, but at the moment Bartender is still the best option unfortunately.
Let this be an example to any dev in this situation on how NOT to handle things. Everything about this transfer feels shady. The lack of response to direct questions after posting in a public forum is just all sorts of tone deaf. By making the public post, you're clearly aware there's concern. Then you post a murky and ambiguous response. You then do not follow up with concerns about the lack of information in the post. Just tell all of your users you don't care about them and you're about to unleash all sorts of nasty malware with a future update. At least they'll respect you for being honest.
FWIW it appears the latest version on SetApp (5.0.48) is unaffected by this, so feel free to continue using it (and disable auto-updates) if you want, but this whole things feels pretty icky so I went ahead and uninstalled. Looking into alternatives. Really wish Apple would address this problem natively.
Given the proximity of this development to WWDC, it seems like there's a chance Apple has acquired Bartender and has incorporated its functionality into the next MacOS release.
Doesn't Apple usually just buy companies publically and then later announce that the product has been discontinued? That's what happened to Dark Sky.
I'd hope for Apple to actually incorporate this into the fucking OS itself so that we didn't run through these hoops for pretty basic functionality that has been in Windows for what, two decades?
If Apple wanted to implement a simlar feature, they would just do it. They wouldn't buy a 3rd party app when they could just do it themselves.
The value proposition of these kind of third party UI apps is that the developer cleverly figured out how to manipulate Apple's APIs to do something Apple didn't really intend. Apple themselves can just write their own private API to do it, they don't need the clever hacks.
An update to my own comment, above. After absorbing other comments, I no longer think it's a reasonable possibility that Apple has purchased Bartender. I think we have to assume it's likely to be a malicious actor. There could even be a state-level malicious actor ultimately behind it.
There are so many small apps that really ought to be part of the OS by now. A few that come to mind:
Rectangle, or some sort of default way to control application windows with your keyboard.
Mos / UnnaturalScrollWheels: if you use a docking station, you may want natural scrolling when using your laptop as a laptop, and normal scrolling when using a mouse. Windows and Linux both have this solved for 15 years now, I am amazed Apple continues to ignore this.
Alfred: Apple’s Spotlight app has come a long way but I want to lock, restart and shut down my computer with my keyboard. There are some shortcuts but honestly I can never remember the key combinations. It would be much easier to command + space, type “shut down” and the computer shuts down.
Alfred is truly excellent. Not only is it capable of a wide array of things but is built extremely well, being exceptionally lightweight, stable, extensible, and tiny. It’s increasingly rare for software to be even two of those these days, let alone all of them.
> I want to lock, restart and shut down my computer with my keyboard. There are some shortcuts but honestly I can never remember the key combinations.
If you don’t already know this combo, cmd-? (AKA cmd-shift-/) will drop down the “help” menu in most applications that run in macOS. From there, I use the arrow keys to move to other menus. It’s just one nearly universal hotkey and it works for almost all menu items.
Rectangle user for years, great app. Today I got frustrated enough to find AltTab (https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/), huge improvement to my workflow already.
Sometimes when cmd+tab'ing between apps it'll bring the selected window to the foreground, and sometimes it won't. They'll regain focus for typing, but are hidden behind another window for whatever reason. Fully open windows too, not minimized or anything. Was driving me mad having to click between IntelliJ and Chrome hundreds of times while doing web UI work instead of quick switching with the keyboard.
Yes, that combination to cycle between windows of an app never gives me any trouble. It's when cycling between different apps (cmd + tab) that I run into issues.
FYI, you can use the Keyboard preferences page in System Settings to assign things like “lock screen” (I forget exactly what it’s called) to a key (F15 I think I used).
I don’t know if Restart or Shutdown are allowable choices.
Alfred is fantastic since it let me remove all the junk I don't care about in Spotlight. Which makes search ridiculously fast for the only things I ever want to use search for: opening applications and basic OS functions you mentioned like locking, entirely using the keyboard. There's a fantastic Alfred feature of an additional locking shortcut that blacks out the display immediately instead of meandering on the lock screen afterwards.
I have never had any desire on any OS to search the web, or the app store, or even my files for that matter (without doing so deliberately). Having everything mangled together is so distracting to me and only slows me down. Started liking my M1 Macbook Pro so much more after I discovered Alfred while searching for any tricks that would let me pare down Spotlight to essentially nothing.
I debloated my Windows 11 search to do close to the same thing (although not quite as good as Alfred) and remapped search hotkeys to be consistent across both platforms which is just so pleasant as someone who routinely needs to switch between MacOS and Windows.
on Windows you can also use a standalone launcher like Keyprinha to do the same - only choose the stuff you want to be indexed. And then use Everything to find any file anywhere instantly (can be setup to show results in the same launcher)
Menubar apps as they exist now haven’t ever really been a consideration for Apple for UX/UI design purposes. For somewhere between the first third and half of OS X’s existence it wasn’t even possible to have persistent third party status bar items without some hackery that made the system think third party apps were first party menu extras.
Even today the API they use is intended primarily for ephemeral status bar items that are present only when the host application is open and visible in the Dock, which is worked around by declaring the host app as a chromeless background app so it can stay open and keep the status item visible without cluttering peoples’ docks.
In short, the OS doesn’t have features for managing third party menubar items because indefinitely persisting third party menubar items don’t really have any place in the larger design. Third party menubar items are intended to be few in number and relevant to one of the user’s current tasks.
I haven’t seen a single Mac user on screen share that doesn’t have too many icons on their bar for me.
I want to see almost none. For all of Apple’s insistence on design and clean, the menu bar and those hideous icons always there was the worst one ever.
I’ve been a Bartender user for over 10 years (I believe 12) and I’m now really fucking sad.
Apple devs as well as application developers— menu bar icons are clearly a neglected corner of the ecosystem in that Apple would prefer that app devs not persist icons in the menu bar at all. But the feature is nonetheless wildly popular as the nearest systray-alike functionality on macOS.
Not really. Even in the case where every single app has a good reason to have a menu bar icon, but you're still left with the fact that macOS doesn't let you manage them.
Or maybe they don't all have a good reason but you don't really have a choice about running them (e.g., on your work computer).
If you are visually impaired, you also likely have greatly reduced space for those icons, especially when undocked. (This issue plagues me personally.) In that case, this is not merely a clutter issue: app icons will simply be truncated from the menu bar, and in some cases that may mean that some functionality is just totally inaccessible to you.
It’s included in the SetApp bundle and a highly rated and recommended app on there. It’s not that niche especially for developers and power users that gravitate towards SetApp subscription.
For me, I was already paying for “clean my Mac” and fantastical which both cost the same or more than a SetApp subscription which includes dozens of additional apps.
It’s partially built into the OS, in that you can move almost every first party icon into the control center (via System Settings). That probably isn’t sufficient for everyone, but it was good enough for my usage that I never bothered installing Bartender on my M2-series MBP.
And yet people will swear blind that Apple apps don't get special treatment. Whether things like this... or the earlier days of Safari where it had access to some APIs around power-saving...
Or the most nefarious, where Apple apps were able to bypass most of the TCP/IP stack tracking and send traffic directly, regardless of any on-device filtering or firewalling, like Little Snitch.
And then they claimed it was only "a temporary measure while they dealt with updating software", but they never did explain why an app like TextEdit would have ever needed a kernel network extension in the first place.
That to me was almost certainly a post-facto attempt at justification when they were caught with their hand in the cookie jar.
But I can't imagine contortions around "yeah, it's an exceptionally simple bundled text editor but trust us, it really needed that network kernel extension."
