awesome-mac VS hidden

A large number of extremely talented engineers might beg to differ. Everything you listed as an issue has a solution. Like any operating system, you have to spend the time to learn the intricacies of how it works and to customize it to your liking. For me, must haves are Alfred to replace spotlight, my dotfiles which change a ton of defaults in various apps like finder, the dock, etc, setup key repeat, iterm2 colors and profile, etc. divvy and magnet for window management. Caffeine to prevent sleep. Stats open source menu monitors to replace istatmenus

I’m sure there are newer equivalents to what I’ve listed. I’ve been using those programs for years.

Some jumping off points

https://github.com/jaywcjlove/awesome-mac

https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/cask-install/30d/

Have a look at these lists for more of the things you are looking for: https://github.com/jaywcjlove/awesome-mac

I guess the awesome Mac list is a solid place to start generally speaking, since there are a lot of apps of all kinds of use cases in there. Personally, I especially love - Raycast (replacement for spotlight, check out Alfred as well) - Bartender (to tidy up the menu bar) - AltTab (gives you a Windows like app switcher) - Rectangle (windows like window management) - purepaste (let’s you paste text without formatting)

I always reference this great repo: https://github.com/jaywcjlove/awesome-mac

> * I discovered a free, native macOS solution that doesn't require installing Bartender or any other additional apps.*

> You can adjust the values from 0 to 6 to accommodate even more icons. Personally, I found 6 to be a good fit.

It's ultimately a really petty point - but this is not a fix. This increases the number of apps on the top bar before the problem occurs. Bartender (and hidden[1] - which I discovered in this thread) fix the problem. Calling a technique that delays the problem "a solution" after sneering at a project that actually is a solution just rubs me the wrong way.

[1] https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden

There's Hidden Bar but I think it's a lot like Bartender. It has an arrow too if that's what you want.

Hidden is a great free and open-source alternative

Hidden Bar - hides menu bar icons

hidden bar is the best one from my experience and it’s open source!

Dozer (free - open source), HiddenBar (free), free alternatives to bartender, however, only does 1 thing and that's hiding the icons, not adding an extra menu, nothing just icons here, icons gone.

For apps that you never interact with that way, and won't let you turn their icons off, get HiddenBar.