Ice

Ice arrived at the moment a lot of people were looking for a menu bar manager they did not have to think about, and it covers the core of the job: a divider you drag icons behind, a hotkey to reveal them, drag-and-drop reordering, keyboard search, and the Ice Bar — a separate strip below the menu bar that holds the hidden icons rather than expanding the real one. On a notched MacBook that is most of what you wanted Bartender for in the first place.

The thing to weigh here is not price, it is maintenance. The repository's last push was September 2025, a year ago now, and the README still calls the app a work in progress with icon spacing marked beta. Nothing is broken today. But menu bar behaviour is exactly the sort of thing Apple adjusts in a point release, and there is no support address to write to when it happens — only an issue tracker with no one obviously reading it.

It installs with brew install --cask jordanbaird-ice and needs macOS 14 or later.

If your menu bar setup is load-bearing for work and losing it after an OS update would ruin a morning, buy Bartender instead and get a person behind it. If you just want the clutter gone, this costs nothing and takes five minutes.