MenuBarBuddy

A lightweight macOS menu bar manager that lets you hide and show menu bar icons with a single click.

How It Works

MenuBarBuddy adds two items to your menu bar:

• The dot (right) — a small colored dot. Click to collapse/expand. Always visible: green (or animated rainbow) when expanded, grayed out when collapsed and idle, vivid on hover.
• │ Separator (left of the dot) — a thin line marking the boundary. Everything to its left gets hidden when collapsed.

Positioning

By default, all your other menu bar items sit to the left of │ and will be hidden when you collapse.

To keep certain items always visible, Cmd-drag them to be between │ and the dot.

Controls

• Left-click the dot to toggle collapse/expand
• Right-click the dot for the context menu (settings, quit)
• Ctrl+Opt+Space hotkey to toggle from anywhere
• Cmd-drag │ to reposition the boundary

Customization

Right-click the dot → Rainbow Dot to make it phase through the color wheel (~8s per cycle): grayed out while collapsed and idle, vivid on hover or when expanded. Right-click → Start at Login to keep it running after reboots.

Right-click the dot → Choose Icons... opens the icon picker window. Note: the custom emoji pickers in this window are currently non-functional (the toggle always renders as the dot); see docs/pre-launch-review.md. The working customizations are Rainbow Dot and Start at Login.

Requirements

• macOS 14+ (verified on macOS 26 Tahoe)

Building

./install.sh

Builds a release binary, assembles /Applications/MenuBarBuddy.app from Support/Info.plist, codesigns, and relaunches.

macOS 26 note: NSStatusItem.length is hard-capped at 10,000 and throws above it. See HANDOFF.md for the full Tahoe compatibility story.

Dependencies

• HotKey — Global keyboard shortcut support