MacOS and Windows have at least one thing in common: the right-hand side of the toolbar – the menu bar in one case, the task bar in the other – is filled with little icons designed to make life easier. However, once you’ve installed a certain number of applications on your machine, you quickly find yourself with a large number of icons, to the point where they sometimes nibble away at the menus. So how do you hide macOS menu bar icons?
Bartender: the ultra-complete, pay-as-you-go solution
While on Windows, hiding the icons on the right-hand side of the taskbar is just a matter of drag-and-drop, since the operating system already includes a menu for tidying things up, on macOS it’s always been a bit more complicated. A little, because in reality it’s nothing more complex than installing an application. Historically, this application is Bartender.
So, for the modest sum of €16, you can finally do what Windows has been doing for free for over a decade! Fortunately, Bartender does more than simply hide icons. In fact, it’s possible to reduce or increase the spacing between icons, allowing you to display more and hide less.
Bartender also brings you the Bartender bar, a second menu bar that lets you store more icons. This feature is very similar to the way Windows works.
A quick-search feature is also available, so you’ll never again have to search for that pesky application that decided to use an almost invisible icon – Steelseries ExactMouse in our case. Finally, it’s possible to display certain icons only if they meet certain conditions. For example, it’s possible to display the battery indicator only if you’re below 50%, or the Wi-Fi icon if you’re not connected to any network.
Bartender is packed with other little features that will undoubtedly make your daily life easier. So, while €16 is a rather hefty sum for an application that, at first glance, simply lets you hide a few icons, Bartender actually does a lot more than that.
Hidden Bar: open-source, free and simple
If you don’t see the point in Bartender’s various features and simply want to hide those icons you can’t see any more, without getting out your credit card, there’s an open-source alternative: Hidden Bar.
The source code is fully available on Github, the same place where you can download the latest version if you want to install it yourself. Otherwise, you can download the application from the App Store, free of charge. Hidden Bar does exactly what you’d expect of it: it hides the icons you want, no more, no less. So, in terms of functionality, the app pales in comparison with Bartender, but you have to bear in mind that it costs €16 less.
As the application effectively explains when it first starts up, two indicators are added to your menu bar. The first, a vertical bar ( | ), delimits the hidden icons from those constantly displayed. What’s to the left of the bar will be hidden, what’s to the right of it will remain displayed
For the sum of 0€, Hidden Bar delivers what it promises, allowing you to clean up your menu bar, free of charge.
