Manage Cluttered Mac Menu Bar Icons with Hidden Bar
Many modern Mac users have various apps that utilize menu bar items, whether for reminders, sports scores, a clipboard manager, watching system stats, or anything else. While menu bar items are super useful, a problem that can happen (especially with modern Mac laptops with the annoying Notch design) rather quickly is the menu bar being too cluttered, with menu bar icons either disappearing behind the notch, or not having enough room to show at all.
This is where Hidden Bar comes in, a free Mac app that allows you to collapse and hide menu bar icons, and reveal them with just a click. Hidden Bar is the perfect solution to a cluttered menu bar, so if you’re juggling tons of menu bar items, don’t miss this handy tool.
You can grab Hidden Bar from the Mac App Store or GitHub, both offer free downloads.
For most Mac users, getting it from the App Store is probably the easiest, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the sort of user unfriendly experiencing of downloading full apps from Github. Whichever way you choose, the app is the same.
Launching Hidden Bar presents a super quick setup and splash screen, so configure the app how you want it to work, drag it to the locations where you want to collapse and hide/reveal the menu bar icons, and that’s it. Then it’s just a matter of clicking the Hidden Bar icon to hide or show the remainder of your menu bar items.
We’ve discussed Hidden Bar before in the context of generally useful menubar apps, but it’s so useful that it’s worthy of an article all its own. Hidden Bar is handy enough that it’s surprising that Apple has not incorporated this type of feature directly into MacOS (yet, anyway), particularly since menu bar space is extra tight on the Notch MacBook Pro and Notch MacBook Air.
Have you used Hidden Bar before? What do you think of this app or others like it? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.
Neat app, thanks for the heads up. I’ve heard of Bartender as @Prescott mentioned and a lot of people use it at my office, but I’ve never tried any of these. Having mentioned this to another coworker, he mentioned an app called Ice that does a similar thing.
https://icemenubar.app/
I’ll try out a few and go with one, my 15″ MBA menu bar is so cluttered that I lose things behind the notch dead area regularly.
Thank you for the work as usual.
I’ve used Bartender for a long while, which does largely the same thing. But if there’s a free version, I’ll definitely give that a spin. What I like about Bartender is its ability to have an icon show where there is activity for that app, or to hide an app entirely. At a glance, I don’t see that functionality, but of course I’ll need to test it to verify.