HiddenBarIcons

A tiny macOS menu-bar app that fixes the notch problem: when your menu bar overflows, macOS hides the icons that would fall under the MacBook notch and you can no longer reach them. HiddenBarIcons adds (ironically) one more menu-bar icon — click it and your hidden icons are revealed.

Status-bar-only app (no Dock icon). macOS 14 (Sonoma) and later. Universal (Apple Silicon + Intel). Auto-updates via Sparkle.

Install

Install with Homebrew:

brew install --cask mekedron/tap/hiddenbaricons

Or download the .dmg from the latest release, open it, and drag HiddenBarIcons into Applications. Builds are signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so they open without a Gatekeeper prompt — and the app keeps itself up to date automatically.

How it works

HiddenBarIcons places two status items in your menu bar:

• a separator | — drag the icons you want to hide to its left;
• an arrow — left-click it (or press ⌘⌥B) to collapse/expand.

When collapsed, the separator stretches to push everything on its left off-screen (behind the notch / off the edge); expanding brings them back. Right-click (or ⌃-click) the arrow for the menu: Preferences, Check for Updates, Hide/Show Notch (on notched Macs), the list of currently-hidden apps (with Accessibility granted), and Quit.

Features

• One-click collapse/expand of your menu-bar icons, plus a global ⌘⌥B hotkey.
• Auto-collapse after a configurable delay.
• Full-expand mode — temporarily shows a Dock icon and an empty menu bar to free up the whole bar.
• Hidden-apps list — using the Accessibility API, lists the menu-bar items currently hidden so you can click one to open it (optionally right-click it).
• Hide/Show Notch — switches the built-in display to a notchless 16:10 mode.
• Hold ⌘ to peek the separator when "hide separator when expanded" is on.

Building

The Xcode project is generated from project.yml with XcodeGen. The generated HiddenBarIcons.xcodeproj is committed, so a plain clone builds in Xcode or from the command line with no extra tooling.

# Open in Xcode and run, or build from the CLI:
xcodebuild build -project HiddenBarIcons.xcodeproj -scheme HiddenBarIcons -configuration Debug

If you change project.yml, regenerate the project:

brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate

Regenerate the app icon / menu-bar glyphs (writes into Assets.xcassets):

swift scripts/generate-icon.swift

Releasing

Releases are fully automated by .github/workflows/release.yml. Push a semver tag and CI builds a universal binary, code-signs it with Developer ID, notarizes + staples the .app and .dmg, signs the DMG for Sparkle, creates a GitHub Release with the DMG, and commits the updated appcast.xml to main:

git tag v0.1.0
git push origin v0.1.0

Without signing secrets configured the workflow still runs end-to-end and ships an ad-hoc-signed DMG (Gatekeeper will warn) — handy for a first smoke test.

License

MIT-licensed — see LICENSE.