Ever since Apple launched Mountain Lion, each new macOS version offered you the abilities to rearrange and remove Menu Bar items. Sadly, you still don't get access to options for hiding your Menu Bar icons for a certain amount of time. For this reason, programs like Bartender were created.
This utility gives you access to various options for keeping your Menu Bar clean. With its help, you can hide the items you don't need on the screen while keeping the necessary Menu Bar icons visible at all times. The program automatically identifies every icon from your Menu Bar and gives you access to view options for each of the listed items.
To enable Bartender's Menu Bar cleaning feature, simply click its icon (it's located on your Menu Bar). Click its icon again to reveal all items in the Menu Bar.
In addition, you can define various global hotkeys for immediately completing Bartender-related tasks, like showing all Menu Bar icons. It also uses a very small amount of CPU resources while operating in your Menu Bar.
To conclude, you should give Bartender a try if you're looking for a simple and quick way to organize and clean up your Menu Bar.
v3.0 [Aug 30, 2017]
- Completely rewritten for modern macOS: Bartender has been completely rewritten from the ground up in Swift using best practices to work with modern macOS, it also paves the way for many new features we have planned. The biggest change is you no longer require a helper to be installed in menu item apps to control them. This means you no longer do anything that SIP (System Integrity Protection) is interested in and can work with any menu bar app including those with increased security (Such as Apple System items). What this does now mean though is that Bartender is no longer able to display the Bartender Bar beneath the menu bar but instead displayed it in the main menu bar removing normally shown items to display the Bartender Bar items.
- macOS High Sierra Compatibility: Full macOS High Sierra compatibility. We did consider calling it High Bartender but thought better of it.
- iStat Menus Individual item control: now Bartender can control iStat menus items individually.
- Better compatibility with some app setups: Some apps have old preferences remaining from previous versions etc, Bartender now better detects this correctly.
- Crash fix.
- Multiscreen setups: Bartender now works more reliably on setups with multiple screens.
- Autohide on App Switching: Autohide would only trigger on mouse events, you now also autohide when a new app becomes active (say via keyboard app switching).
- Better checking for removed items: Bartender checks for items removed by menu bar apps, but was producing some false positives in some situations, causing items to not be shown - it was improved.
- Menu item positions saved: you can now save menu bar positions (previously it relied on macOS to do this) this should help maintain positions between Bartender restarts/reboots.
- Esc and Enter Keys while searching: Pressing esc while searching will now exit search and reset the menu bar, pressing enter will start keyboard navigation.
- Bartender Icons: Fixed the vertical positioning of the ●●● icon. Other icon options now display a variation of the icon when Bartender is showing Bartender items in the menu bar.
- Improved reliability on some systems: For some users Bartender has been underperforming/not working correctly. With a lot of help from a user (thank you) to debug/log this, it should now work correctly and performance should be better.
- Expanded menu bar not always showing: For some users Bartender would not always expand the menu bar when needed (remove the left menu so all items could be seen) this is now fixed.
- Items messed up in menu bar, not aligned to each other correctly. For a small number of users, items can become messed up in the menu bar, not aligned to each other correctly. With this version Bartender should be able to reset them.
- Bartender transition speed: Bartender should be slightly faster at switching states for some users.
- Airport Displays Position changing: added in more fixes to try and get Airport Displays to not jump position.
- Licenses with white space not accepted: Bartender 3 license checking is a bit more stringent than Bartender 2, if a user had trailing white space in there license name from Bartender 2 it would fail to verify in Bartender 3.
- Small UI fixes: Fixes for UI issues in Preferences, and spelling mistakes.
- GiFox compatibility message: Version 1.4.0 of GiFox is compatible with Bartender, have updated the message shown for older versions of GiFox, letting them know if they update it will work.
- Private Internet Access compatibility message: Version 72 of PIA is compatible with Bartender 3, have updated the message shown for older versions of PIA, letting them know if they update it will work.
- Bartender already running check: Bartender was not checking to see if another version of Bartender may be running, this has been fixed.
Launchd(8) frontend for Mac that allows you to manage and debug system & user services with a sophisticated interface.
