hiddenSeparator.length = 10_000 // hidden items pushed off-screen

Free & open source · menu bar app for macOS

Keep the bar clear.

Barback tucks the menu bar icons you rarely need behind a chevron, and brings them back with one click or ⌃⌥⌘B. No polling, no screen recording, no permissions required. One job, done instantly.

brew install --cask mrashrhodes/tap/barback

Download v0.1.0 View source

macOS 14 Sonoma or later · Apple silicon & Intel · MIT license

No. 01 House recipe

How it’s mixed

Every good menu bar hider runs on one old trick, and it fits on an index card.

Recipe card · v0.1.0

The Barback

A clear menu bar, served instantly.

Serves: 1 Mac
Glass: Any menu bar
Garnish: One chevron

Ingredients

1chevron ‹ the toggle, always in view
1separator │ hides what sits to its left
1always-hidden separator ┊ optional
1hotkey ⌃⌥⌘B to taste
0required permissions
0dependencies

Method

Install Barback and open it. A chevron ‹ and a separator │ appear in your menu bar, with a short tip to show you around.
Hold ⌘ and drag the icons you rarely use to the left of the │.
Click the chevron or press ⌃⌥⌘B. The separator stretches to 10,000 points and pushes everything on its left off the screen. Click again and it shrinks back to a 14-point sliver.
For icons you almost never need, switch on the always-hidden section in Settings and drag them left of the ┊. Option-click the chevron to see everything.

Barback’s note: if the │ ends up to the right of the chevron, Barback won’t stretch it, because that would hide Barback too. It shows you how to drag it back instead.

No. 02 The tab

Runs up nothing.

Here’s everything Barback charges your Mac while it sits in the menu bar. Showing and hiding is one layout change of its own status items, so there’s nothing left running in between.

The only timers are one-shot: the auto-rehide, plus a short dwell and a 0.4-second exit delay if you switch on show-on-hover, which checks the pointer at most 20 times a second. Hiding on app switch just listens for a system notification.

Barback

Menu bar service · v0.1.0
Table: your menu bar

Polling loops: 0
Screen captures: 0
Event taps: 0
Synthetic mouse drags: 0
Required permissions: 0
Network requests: 0
Third-party dependencies: 0
Price: $0.00
Tip: a ★ on GitHub
Total: $0.00

Idle CPU ≈ 0% · MIT license

Thank you, come again.

github.com/MrAshRhodes/barback

No. 03 The menu

Signatures

Hidden section⌘-drag

Drag icons left of the │ separator. One click on the chevron tucks them away or brings them back.
Always-hidden section⌥-click

A second separator ┊ for icons you almost never need. Off until you want it. Option-click the chevron to see everything.
Global hotkey⌃⌥⌘B

Rebind it to any combination with ⌘, ⌥ or ⌃. Works without Accessibility permission, and VoiceOver announces the result.
Auto-rehide10 s

Hidden icons tuck themselves away again after 10 seconds, or anywhere from 5 seconds to 5 minutes, or never. Optionally, they also go the moment you switch apps. Either way, they wait while your pointer is in the menu bar or a menu is open.
Show on hoveropt-in

Rest the pointer on the right-hand side of the menu bar to reveal hidden icons. They hide again 0.4 seconds after it leaves the bar.

House standards

Launch at loginone switch

Uses the system’s own login items.
Notch awareflagged

Icons that would land behind the camera housing are flagged in Settings › Items.
Items liston demand

Every menu bar item and its section, built only when you open the tab. On macOS 26, optional Accessibility access adds app names.
Native settingsSwiftUI

Liquid Glass on macOS 26 Tahoe, standard controls back to Sonoma.
Universalarm64 · x86_64

One small binary for Apple silicon and Intel Macs on macOS 14 or later.
Idle CPU≈ 0%

No polling loops. Nothing runs until you click.

Specials

Appearance5 styles

Five one-click styles (Classic, Minimal, Cocktail, Eye, Arrows) with a live preview, or mix your own: nine toggle icons in four weights, six separator styles, an accent tint while hidden icons show, and up to three extra dividers. Only Barback’s own items change.
Automationbarback://

Drive it from Shortcuts, scripts, Raycast, Alfred or a Stream Deck: open -g barback://toggle, or swap in show, hide, show-all, toggle-all or settings. URLs can’t change your settings.

Barback Settings, General tab: launch at login, hide items again after 10 seconds, show hidden items when hovering, the always-hidden section, and the ⌃⌥⌘B keyboard shortcut. — Plate 1 Settings › General

Barback’s right-click menu: About Barback, Show Hidden Items (⌃⌥⌘B), Show Always-Hidden Items, Settings… (⌘,) and Quit Barback. — Plate 2 Right-click the chevron

Straight from the kitchen: real screenshots, macOS dark mode.

No. 04 Behind the bar

Same trick. Less machinery.

Barback started as a teardown of Bartender 6.6.2. Static analysis only: the binary was read, never run, patched or redistributed. The question was how much machinery a menu bar hider really needs.

Inside: a two-speed polling loop, seven call sites that capture images of menu bar windows, six event-tap call sites, synthetic ⌘-drag mouse events for rearranging, an Accessibility crawl of menu bar apps through an XPC helper, and network endpoints for updates, licensing and subscriptions.

And at the heart of it, the same trick the open-source hiders use: a separator whose length jumps to 10,000 points. Barback keeps that trick and leaves the rest of the machinery out.

To be fair, that machinery powers real features: automatic rearranging, the Bartender Bar, search and menu bar styling. If you rely on them, keep using Bartender. If you only want icons out of the way, that’s the one job Barback does.

How each one hides your icons
Job	Bartender 6.6.2	Barback 0.1.0
Hide & show	Separator length trick	Same trick
Background work	Two-speed polling loop	None, event-driven
Screen capture	Images of menu bar items	None
Event taps	Six call sites	None
Rearranging	Synthetic ⌘-drags	You ⌘-drag, macOS remembers
App names	Accessibility crawl via an XPC helper	Optional, Settings › Items only
Network	Updates, licensing, subscriptions	None
Size	≈ 36 MB binary, ~45 frameworks	≈ 1.8 MB, system frameworks only

The whole trick, more or less

hiddenSeparator.length = 10_000  // hide: push it all off-screen
hiddenSeparator.length = 14      // show: back to a sliver

Barback stands on the shoulders of Hidden Bar, Ice and Dozer, which pioneered the separator technique.

Bartender is a trademark of its respective owners. Barback is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.

No. 05 Install

Last call.

zsh

$ brew install --cask mrashrhodes/tap/barback
==> Tapping mrashrhodes/tap
==> Downloading https://github.com/MrAshRhodes/barback/releases/download/v0.1.0/Barback-0.1.0.zip
==> Installing Cask barback
==> Moving App 'Barback.app' to '/Applications/Barback.app'
🍺  barback was successfully installed!

Download

Prefer a zip? Grab Barback-0.1.0.zip and its .sha256 from Releases, check it with shasum -a 256 -c, then move Barback.app to Applications.

Update with brew upgrade --cask barback.

Requirements

macOS 14 Sonoma or later
Apple silicon or Intel
About 1.8 MB on disk
No permissions required

The honest bit

Barback is ad-hoc signed, not notarized. The Homebrew cask clears the quarantine flag for you. If macOS blocks a manual download, right-click the app and choose Open (macOS 14), or use System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway (macOS 15 and later). Or clear the flag yourself:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Barback.app

First round: hold ⌘ and drag the icons you want gone to the left of the │, then click the chevron. Need a refresher later? Right-click the chevron and choose Getting Started.

No. 06 Questions

Ask the barback

Does Barback need any permissions?

No. Hiding, showing, the hotkey, hover and URL commands all work without Screen Recording or Accessibility. Accessibility is optional and used for one thing: showing app names in Settings › Items on macOS 26, where many items are hosted by Control Center.

Will it rearrange my icons for me?

No, on purpose. You ⌘-drag icons where you want them and macOS remembers the order. Automatic rearranging needs synthetic mouse events, which is exactly the kind of machinery Barback leaves out.

macOS 26 can already turn menu bar items off. Why Barback?

The “Allow in the Menu Bar” switches in System Settings remove items completely. Barback keeps them one click away. They work well together: switch off what you never use, tuck away what you only need sometimes.

Does it phone home?

No. There’s no networking code at all: no telemetry, no analytics, no update checks. Updates come through Homebrew or GitHub Releases.

What does it cost?

Nothing. Barback is free and open source under the MIT license. If it earns its keep, a star on GitHub is the tip jar.

Something missing or broken?

Open an issue on GitHub. Small, focused pull requests are welcome too.