Menu bar manager · macOS 14+
Halo pushes the status items you never click past the edge of the screen, then keeps a searchable index of all of them, including the ones sitting under the camera housing. Hidden items slide back out for four seconds when something changes. Accessibility permission, nothing else.
14 days, no card. One key covers 3 Macs. Keeps working offline for a month at a time.
Five items tucked behind one divider.
Why it exists
Three apps own this category. Here is where each one stands, put as fairly as I can put it.
New owner, announced after the fact, and the first release under it added Profile Sync, which puts your menu bar layout in someone else's cloud. Bartender is still good at hiding icons. A lot of people decided they would rather not find out what the next release adds.
Ice was the free answer and a well-built one. Commits have mostly stopped, Ice Bar crashes on Tahoe, and a fork called IceMelt is carrying the project. Free and unmaintained is still free.
macOS can hide some menu bar items in System Settings. You set the list once and that is the feature: no auto-hide, no rules, no search, no idea what the notch is covering, and Control Center cannot be hidden at all.
Managers lose items because they track them by position on screen. Halo fingerprints each item by owning bundle, accessibility title and ordinal, then resolves that fingerprint again after every layout event. Hiding is only safe if you can always get the thing back, so there are two ways back: type the name, or wait for the item to change and come out by itself.
The hiding trick is the same one Bartender and Ice use. Halo keeps its own dividers in the bar and stretches one until everything to its left is past the screen edge. What is different is the verify-and-retry loop around every move, so a failed drag never leaves you holding half a layout.
Ten things
One picture each. Keep scrolling.
Halo fingerprints each item by owning bundle, accessibility title and ordinal. After a display change or an OS reorder it looks the fingerprint up again instead of trusting a position.
Plug in a monitor and nothing goes missing.
⇧⌘Space opens a palette holding every status item on the bar, visible, hidden or behind the housing, with fuzzy search. Press return and that item's own menu drops down where it normally would.
You stop clicking icons to find out which one is Docker.
Halo puts an accessibility observer on every hidden item and watches its title and value. Battery at 10%, Dropbox syncing, VPN dropped, Time Machine running: the item slides out for four seconds and tucks back.
This is the part that makes hiding feel safe.
Halo reads the housing rectangle for each display and the width of the frontmost app's menu titles, then marks every item that lands inside either. macOS reports those items as visible, which is how you end up clicking dead space.
Items hidden by accident can move into the Tray by themselves.
A floating glass panel that springs down from under the housing, or off the right edge of the bar on an external display. Tiles are drawn from the app icon and the accessibility title, never from pixels.
Nothing is captured, which is why no capture permission is needed.
Save an arrangement per display set, per Space, per Focus mode: laptop only, docked with two monitors, projector. Halo keys each one to the sorted display serial numbers and swaps when the set changes.
One bar for the desk, a shorter one for the train.
Show 1Password while Safari is frontmost. Hide everything when a screen recorder starts, using triggers for frontmost app, power, network, Bluetooth device, display count, time window, calendar event, item value and Focus mode.
No condition builder, no tree of ANDs to debug.
Give an item a key and pressing it opens that item's menu, wherever the item happens to be sitting. Shortcuts actions, a halo:// URL scheme and a halo command cover the rest.
⌥⌘B for Battery, without aiming at a 22-point target.
Call a group Work, System or Dev, give it a label chip, and drag items between groups inside the Tray. macOS gives you command-drag and no labels at all.
The Tray reads like a shelf instead of a row of guesses.
If Eclipse is installed, Halo publishes the hidden set to it as one more tab. Same hover, same panel, same hotkey.
One gesture covers both apps.
The app itself
The replica is 1:1 and live. Drag an item between zones and the real bar moves under your cursor. Below it sits the notch-truth line, then every item with the process that owns it and what Halo is doing to it right now. There is no separate visible list and hidden list to keep in sync.
Compare
Checked in September 2026 against the shipping versions. If a row goes stale, mail me and I will fix it.
| Halo | Bartender 5 | Ice | Lounge | macOS built-in | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Notch-aware Tray | Yes | Bar, not notch-aware | Ice Bar, crashes on Tahoe | Yes | No |
| Search every item by name | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Hidden items peek on change | Yes | Yes, via Screen Recording | No | No | No |
| Rules | Ten triggers | Triggers | No | No | No |
| Per-context layouts | Display, Space, Focus | Presets | No | No | No |
| Accessibility only | Yes | Asks for capture | Yes | Yes | n/a |
| No account or server | Yes | Account for Profile Sync | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| One-time price | Yes | Yes | Free, open source | Yes | Included |
| Price | $15 once | $16 once | Free | Paid, one-time | Free |
Bartender is a capable app and its authors solved this problem first. My disagreement is with the account and the capture prompt, not the craft.
What it needs
Required. Halo reads each item's title and value from the app that owns it, presses an item so its real menu opens, and synthesises the command-drag that moves one. Without Accessibility, macOS hands an app a set of rectangles and no names.
Granted per code signature in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility. Revoke it and Halo stops, rather than degrading quietly.
Halo never asks for it. Tray tiles come from the app icon and the accessibility title, so there is nothing on screen worth capturing. Peek-on-change listens for accessibility notifications, not for pixels changing colour.
Also never used: Input Monitoring, Full Disk Access, contacts, location, network servers.
Pricing
Halo
$15once
Checkout by Dodo Payments. Key and download appear the moment the payment clears.
Everything
$29once
Or run the trial first and decide later. Download Halo
Questions
Halo is built and tested on macOS 15, where everything on this page works. Tahoe support is in progress, because Tahoe hosts some status items inside the Control Centre process and they have to be enumerated there too: if it is not ready when you upgrade, mail me for a full refund, past 14 days or not.
No. Without a notch the Tray slides out of the right edge of the menu bar and the notch-truth line reports no housing; everything else is identical.
Both, on macOS 14 Sonoma or later. The build is universal.
Everything, for 14 days, no card and no account, with the start date kept in your keychain. When it runs out Halo stops hiding items rather than holding your bar hostage.
You get a key, Halo checks its signature on your Mac, and then it stops calling out. One key covers 3 Macs, and there is no activation server that can go dark and lock you out.
14 days, no questions. Reply to the receipt.
Moving an item means synthesising a command-drag, which can fail, so Halo checks the result of every move and retries three times with backoff. If it still will not stick, the item goes into the Tray with a note, and quitting Halo puts everything back in the real bar.
Run one at a time. Two apps stretching dividers in the same bar will fight each other, so quit the other one first.
