// the find
stonerl/Thaw
Menu bar manager for macOS 26
Thaw is a macOS menu bar manager — a fork of the abandoned Ice project — that lets you hide/show menu bar items, customize the bar's appearance, and arrange items via drag-and-drop. It targets macOS 14+ and is actively maintained to keep up with new macOS releases where Ice went quiet. The primary audience is Mac power users drowning in menu bar clutter.
- Active maintenance of a genuinely useful fork: the original Ice stalled, and this project has picked up CI, release automation, Homebrew casks (stable + beta channels), and ongoing macOS compatibility work rather than just slapping a new name on it.
- Decent test coverage for a menu bar utility — ~20 test files covering settings serialization, hotkey logic, profile management, and appearance configs, which is more than most similar tools bother with.
- Separate MenuBarItemService XPC helper process for privilege isolation, plus a diagnostics logger and a FREQUENT_ISSUES doc that shows the maintainer is thinking about real-world support load.
- Crowdin-based localization with 18+ languages and live translation progress badges — unusually thorough internationalization for a project at this star count and fork ratio.
- It's explicitly macOS 26-targeted in the description but the badge says macOS 14+; the README is contradictory and will confuse people trying to figure out what they can actually run it on today vs. a future beta.
- Several core features are still unimplemented (individual spacers, item groups, conditional show/hide triggers, menu bar widgets) and the roadmap checkboxes have been carrying over from the Ice days — no indication of timelines or active development on these gaps.
- As a fork, the git history and internal naming (IceBar, IceApp, IceColor, IceForm, etc.) is largely unchanged from Ice, meaning the codebase has two personalities and any serious contributor has to navigate that split identity throughout.
- Relies on screen capture and Accessibility/AX APIs to manage items it doesn't own — this is the only real way to do it on macOS, but it means it's one macOS privacy policy change away from breaking, and the FREQUENT_ISSUES doc already hints at fragility with conflicting apps.