We haven’t had a menu bar exclusive post in awhile (last I see is July 2018) and its the end of the year so why not?!
Are you using a “menu bar manager”?
What’s your general philosophy in tending to your menu bar garden? What do you have to have shown/hidden? Why?
Long-time Bartender (available on Setapp) user here but this weekend’s Changelog newsletter mentioned Hidden Bar which is free and available on the App Store. I’m trying it out and so far my only complaint is that it doesn’t hide the dock icon. (There’s a recent open issue for this, so maybe soon…) I like its “divider” approach:
Bartender can emulate this but it takes a lot more icon position management as you add apps over time.
Here’s the organizational strategy I use with Bartender:
Pretty much the same with Hidden Bar, just have HB’s divider (<) on the far left:
Another thing I like about HB is that you can adjust what’s shown/hidden just by dragging icons around in the Menu Bar, instead of having to go to its Prefs, search for the app, select an option from a dropdown. Bartender has more options but I really don’t use any of them.
iStat Menus sensors for CPU temperature and fan speed, since I’m trying to tweak the settings of Turbo Speed Pro
Telegram
Turbo Speed Pro, which Marco Arment suggested on ATP, and I want to get more mileage out of my battery.
Magnet, which could be hidden since I hardly ever use the menubar feature, but for now it stays
Jetbrains Toolbox so I can open frequently used projects
Arq backup option, which must have changed in the last two minutes, since it’s usually hidden
OneSwitch for small tasks like switching to dark mode and stuff like that
ToothFairy for my PowerBeats Pro which are currently broken and won’t charge, which I could rant about for quite a while…
iStat Menus CPU current load with both all cores and all HT cores showing, I really just have a 6-core MBP
iStat Menus CPU historical load graph
iStat Menus current RAM usage
iStat Menus network historical load graph
iStat Menus current disk usage
iStat Menus battery condition. I think I’m going to hide that when it’s 100%, but didn’t think of it until now…
Cardhop, which I thought I’d use more and am considering just dropping
Fantastical, which I didn’t think use as much as I do, and am definitely NOT dropping.
iStat current time with a world clock.
Current input language. I normally type norwegian prose, but I code in US ANSI - I can’t use a norwegian keyboard for programming, it takes two hands to write the character ‘{’!
Sound…
Bartender menu
external display setting…? No idea why that is showing… (checks) Oh, iPad and Apple TV
Notifications widget which I never use
And hide:
SetApp Menu
Alfred
Docker
Karabiner Elements, for Hyper-key
1Password for the twelfth year running
Spotlight
Hammerspoon for keyboard-based window movement (move to another screen, put on the left side and so on)
Dropbox is doing something…
Numi
Stay so I don’t have to keep putting windows back where they should be every time I have to bring my computer to a meeting
Hey, Arq moved back to hidden again within the 8 seconds between those screenshots…
Bartender again
Notifications widget
Here’s something I wish one of these menubar hiders had: “Show when icon looks like this, this or this, and hide when it looks like this or this” option with all the possible icons for the app.
