The menu bar tends to get cluttered if you have lots of apps installed, and there’s no easy way to manage them on macOS, not to mention little customization for the status bar itself.

Ice is an open-source app meant to serve as a complete customization tool for the menu bar. Not only does it allow you to toggle the visibility of certain icons, but it also offers some cool visual options you can play around with.

No one likes visual clutter, and the menu bar tends to see a lot of it. With Ice, you can use a spacer to separate your icons: those to the right will be visible at all times, while those to the left can be toggled on and off.

To hide or unhide these items, simply click the app’s menu bar icon. An “Always Hidden” section can also be configured, which will only be displayed when holding down a modifier while clicking the Ice icon in the menu bar. Hidden icons can also be shown on hover or when using a hotkey.

If you want to keep things simple, you can add a tint to the menu bar, enable a shadow, and a border. All these features have options you can tweak, so you can give your desktop a pretty unique look.

A more interesting feature is the ability to change the shape of the menu bar and split it into two parts. The app icons, on the right, and app menus, on the left, will be separated, which looks a lot better than I thought it would.

Even though Ice is still in early development, and many planned features have not yet been implemented, it’s already one of the best apps of its kind. Hiding menu bar items is simple, and you get some pretty nice visual customization options to boot. There will probably be more features to come, so it can only get even better.

What's New:

Version 0.10.1:

New

• Menu bar items can now be shown in a secondary bar below the menu bar! (look for "Use Ice Bar" in the "General" settings pane)
• Added ability to move menu bar items individually in a new "Menu Bar Items" settings pane
• Menu bar appearance can now be inset on screens with a notch
• Ice now ensures that the always-hidden section stays to the left of the hidden section
• Added the ability to disable the always-hidden section
• Ice now launches in the background by default
• Ice now uses the GPL-3.0 license

Bug Fixes

• The menu bar appearance overlay should now work with fullscreen in apps that don't use the default macOS fullscreen interface, such as VLC and Keynote
• Reliably check for default macOS fullscreen spaces
• Fixed mouse location checks in fullscreen and when using multiple displays
• The menu bar appearance now renders at the correct size across multiple displays with different sized menu bars (i.e. when one display has a notch and the other does not)
• Fixed screen flicker when playing DRM media
• Improved reliability of application menu hiding
• Fixed excessive CPU usage by menu bar overlay panel when switching apps

Screenshots:

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