jordanbaird/Ice

Powerful menu bar manager for macOS

Summary

Ice is a macOS menu bar manager written in Swift and SwiftUI that hides, reveals, searches, and rearranges menu bar items. It also supports an always-hidden section, a separate bar for notched displays, appearance customization, hotkeys, launch at login, and automatic updates; the README notes that the project is still in active development.

What it is useful for

The menu bar can fill up with status icons from editors, cloud clients, and developer utilities. Ice gives engineers a way to keep less-used items out of the way while retaining access to them. For example, hidden items can appear when hovering over the menu bar, clicking an empty area, or scrolling or swiping across it, with automatic rehiding available.

Items can be reordered through a drag-and-drop interface, searched through a dedicated panel, and placed in an “always-hidden” section. On MacBooks with a notch, the separate Ice Bar provides another place to display hidden items. Appearance options include solid or gradient tints, shadows, borders, and rounded or split shapes.

Hotkeys can toggle individual sections, open search, enable or disable the Ice Bar, show section dividers, and toggle application menus. This is useful during development, debugging, or demonstrations when a crowded menu bar makes the working area harder to see.

How engineers can use it

Ice requires macOS 14 or later because it uses system APIs unavailable in earlier versions. There are no plans to support older releases.

For a manual installation, download Ice.zip from the latest GitHub release, unzip it, and move the app into the Applications folder. Homebrew users can install it with:

brew install --cask jordanbaird-ice

After launching Ice, arrange items with the drag-and-drop interface, decide which items remain visible, move others into the always-hidden section, and configure how hidden items are revealed. The search panel and hotkeys can provide quick access to menu bar controls during development. Launch-at-login and automatic-update settings are also available.

The project is GPL-3.0 licensed. Some features remain on the roadmap, including profiles, item groups, and trigger-based visibility, while menu bar spacing is marked as beta. For engineers interested in the source, the repository is identified as a Swift/SwiftUI project, but the README does not document a development build, test command, or contribution setup, so those steps should not be assumed.