// the find
jordanbaird/Ice
Powerful menu bar manager for macOS
Ice is a free macOS menu bar manager that hides, reorganizes, and customizes the appearance of status bar items. It's the open-source alternative to Bartender after that app's controversial acquisition — same idea, GPL-3.0, actively maintained by a single developer.
The feature set is genuinely broad for a solo project: drag-and-drop reordering, a separate 'Ice Bar' panel for notch Macs, menu bar item search, and appearance customization (tint, border, custom shapes) all work. The code is well-structured Swift with clear separation between managers, UI, and utilities — not spaghetti. Homebrew cask install means zero friction for most developers. The versioned appearance configuration files (V1/V2) suggest the author actually thinks about migration rather than breaking users silently.
macOS 14+ only is a real cut — anyone on Ventura is out, and the README doesn't explain the tradeoff honestly beyond 'we use new APIs.' A meaningful chunk of the roadmap (profiles, item groups, rounded screen corners, widgets) is still unchecked, so if you need those features you're back to Bartender. It's a one-person project with no test suite visible in the tree, which means regressions in complex screen-capture and event-tap code are a matter of when, not if. The spacing feature is still marked BETA with no ETA, and it's the one feature that would replace manual spacer hacks most developers actually use.