Ice

Ice is a free, open-source menu bar manager for macOS built by Jordan Baird. It lets you hide, show, and reorganize the icons in your Mac's menu bar, and includes powerful customization features that go beyond simple organization. If you're running a MacBook with a notch and your menu bar icons are getting clipped behind it, Ice solves that problem elegantly. The menu bar on macOS has been getting increasingly crowded. Between system icons (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, battery, Control Center, Siri, clock) and app icons (1Password, Bartender, Rectangle, Stats, iStat Menus, Dropbox, Docker, Amphetamine, Tailscale, clipboard managers), a typical power user's menu bar can have 15-25 icons. On a 14-inch MacBook Pro, the notch eats the center of the menu bar, and icons that overflow behind the notch become inaccessible. Before Ice, the go-to solution was Bartender—a paid app that hid and organized menu bar icons. When Bartender was acquired in 2024 under circumstances that raised privacy concerns, many users looked for alternatives. Ice emerged as the free, open-source answer. Ice creates up to three sections in your menu bar: always visible, hidden (revealed by clicking an Ice icon or a hotkey), and an 'always hidden' section that stays out of sight. You drag icons between sections to organize them. Icons in the hidden section slide out from behind the Ice separator when needed, either appearing below the menu bar or within it depending on your settings. Recent versions have added menu bar appearance customization, allowing you to change the menu bar's look with tints, shapes, and transparency effects. Ice also features menu bar item search—press a hotkey to quickly find and access any menu bar item without hunting through hidden sections. Custom spacing between icons gives you fine-grained control over the menu bar's density. Ice is lightweight, runs natively on macOS 14+ (Sonoma and later), and uses minimal resources. It's actively maintained with frequent updates adding new features.