// the find
dwarvesf/hidden
An ultra-light MacOS utility that helps hide menu bar icons
Hidden Bar is a free, open-source macOS menu bar icon manager that works by placing a separator item in the menu bar and collapsing everything to its left. It's a well-established alternative to paid options like Bartender, especially relevant since Bartender's ownership controversy in 2024 drove users toward open alternatives.
- The hiding mechanism is clever and doesn't require accessibility permissions or private APIs — it exploits the native menu bar ordering behavior, which is documented in ARCHITECTURE.md and keeps the app sandboxable for App Store distribution.
- Multiple install paths (App Store, Homebrew cask, direct download) and the app is notarized outside the App Store, so no Gatekeeper warnings.
- Localization coverage is genuinely broad: Arabic, German, French, Croatian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese — unusual for a utility this small.
- Documentation is better than average for a free utility: separate MANUAL.md, ARCHITECTURE.md, and a maintainer RUNBOOK.md covering build, verification, and release steps.
- The core hiding trick relies on icon ordering in the menu bar, so you can't selectively hide specific icons — anything to the left of the separator gets hidden. Apps like Bartender that use private APIs can target individual items; Hidden Bar cannot.
- No per-app persistence or profiles: if an app restarts and its icon reappears in a different position, you have to manually re-arrange. This is a known architectural limit, not something a PR can easily fix.
- Requires macOS 13+ now, and the jump from the last Monterey-compatible release (v1.10) to current is a hard cliff — users on older hardware get abandoned without a clear upgrade path.
- Zero automated tests in the repo. For a utility that hooks into the menu bar at launch, even basic UI tests for the toggle behavior would help catch regressions between macOS releases, which have historically broken this category of app.