HiddenBarIcons

Important

This project is archived — Apple fixed the notch

macOS 27 ships a native overflow button. When your menu bar runs out of room, the system now collapses the extra icons behind a » chevron that sits next to the notch — and you can actually click it. Reaching the icons the notch used to swallow was the one and only reason HiddenBarIcons existed, so the app has nothing left to do.

On top of that, HiddenBarIcons itself no longer works on macOS 27 (#3). It still works on macOS 14–26 and the latest release stays downloadable, but there will be no further fixes, features or releases. Thanks to everyone who used it. 🎉

A tiny macOS menu-bar app that fixes the notch problem: when your menu bar overflows, macOS hides the icons that would fall under the MacBook notch and you can no longer reach them. HiddenBarIcons adds (ironically) one more menu-bar icon — click it and your hidden icons are revealed.

Status-bar-only app (no Dock icon). macOS 14 (Sonoma) through macOS 26 — see the archive notice above for macOS 27. Universal (Apple Silicon + Intel). Auto-updates via Sparkle.

Install

Install with Homebrew:

brew install --cask mekedron/tap/hiddenbaricons

Or download the .dmg from the latest release, open it, and drag HiddenBarIcons into Applications. Builds are signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so they open without a Gatekeeper prompt — and the app keeps itself up to date automatically.

How it works

HiddenBarIcons places two status items in your menu bar:

• a separator | — drag the icons you want to hide to its left;
• an arrow — left-click it (or press ⌘⌥B) to collapse/expand.

When collapsed, the separator stretches to push everything on its left off-screen (behind the notch / off the edge); expanding brings them back. Right-click (or ⌃-click) the arrow for the menu: Preferences, Check for Updates, Hide/Show Notch (on notched Macs), the list of currently-hidden apps (with Accessibility granted), and Quit.

Features

• One-click collapse/expand of your menu-bar icons, plus a global ⌘⌥B hotkey.
• Auto-collapse after a configurable delay.
• Full-expand mode — temporarily shows a Dock icon and an empty menu bar to free up the whole bar.
• Hidden-apps list — using the Accessibility API, lists the menu-bar items currently hidden so you can click one to open it (optionally right-click it).
• Hide/Show Notch — switches the built-in display to a notchless 16:10 mode.
• Hold ⌘ to peek the separator when "hide separator when expanded" is on.

Building

The Xcode project is generated from project.yml with XcodeGen. The generated HiddenBarIcons.xcodeproj is committed, so a plain clone builds in Xcode or from the command line with no extra tooling.

# Open in Xcode and run, or build from the CLI:
xcodebuild build -project HiddenBarIcons.xcodeproj -scheme HiddenBarIcons -configuration Debug

If you change project.yml, regenerate the project:

brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate

Regenerate the app icon / menu-bar glyphs (writes into Assets.xcassets):

swift scripts/generate-icon.swift

Releasing

Releases are fully automated by .github/workflows/release.yml. Push a semver tag and CI builds a universal binary, code-signs it with Developer ID, notarizes + staples the .app and .dmg, signs the DMG for Sparkle, creates a GitHub Release with the DMG, and commits the updated appcast.xml to main:

git tag v0.1.0
git push origin v0.1.0

Without signing secrets configured the workflow still runs end-to-end and ships an ad-hoc-signed DMG (Gatekeeper will warn) — handy for a first smoke test.

License

MIT-licensed — see LICENSE.