// the find
thaw-app/Thaw
The open source menu bar manager
Thaw is a menu-bar manager for macOS that hides and organizes menu bar icons, with reveal gestures, per-context profiles, and a trigger system for conditional visibility. It's aimed at power users running lots of menu bar apps who want Bartender-style control without a subscription or a closed-source binary.
The trigger system goes well beyond simple hide/show — reveal conditions based on battery, Wi-Fi network, Focus mode, active app, or even a script's exit code, combined with AND/OR logic, is more sophisticated than most competitors in this space. The `thaw://` URI scheme gives real automation hooks into Raycast, Shortcuts, and BetterTouchMouse without needing a plugin API. It also takes supply-chain integrity seriously for a utility this size: signed/notarized releases, SLSA Build L3, an OpenSSF Scorecard, and a documented release-verification doc — most menu bar tools don't bother with any of that.
It requires macOS 26+, which as of this repo's last push is a brand-new OS release — that cuts off anyone not already on the latest major version, unusual for a utility this category. Screen Recording is optional but item previews degrade to static app icons without it, so the 'light footprint' pitch comes with a real feature trade-off depending on what you grant. A chunk of the flashier trigger conditions (camera/mic in use, thermal pressure, blinking-icon detection) ship disabled by default and are tucked into Developer settings as 'Experimental,' so the headline feature list oversells what's actually production-ready. The internal codebase still carries the naming of its apparent predecessor (`IceBar`, `IceApp`, `IceCube` assets) even though the product is branded Thaw — the rebrand isn't complete under the hood, worth knowing if you're navigating the source as a contributor.