A curated directory of 700 Mac menu bar apps

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • stats

    macOS system monitor in your menu bar

    Stats is open source & free: https://github.com/exelban/stats

    Works on Apple Silicon with no issues. I used to pay for iStat Menus but Stats is totally fine for my needs, so I do not use iStat Menus anymore.

  • bitbar

    Put the output from any script or program into your macOS Menu Bar (the BitBar reboot)

    Then it will create a menu bar entry titled "Hello" with a single element in its drop-down menu, which will open Hacker News when clicked. You place your program in a specific directory for xbar to run, and it can be configured to run at a given frequency, e.g. once a minute to report the results of an API call or some measurement from your system, etc. Up to you to build the menu bar app you want.

    [1] https://xbarapp.com/

  • Appwrite

    Appwrite - The open-source backend cloud platform. Add Auth, Databases, Functions, and Storage to your product and build any application at any scale while using your preferred coding languages and tools.

  • SketchyBar

    A highly customizable macOS status bar replacement

    Not sure why the downvotes, same here. I disabled mine in favour of sketchy bar [0]. I hide most things except for bandwidth and clock. Super handy.

    0: https://github.com/FelixKratz/SketchyBar

  • SwiftBar

    Powerful macOS menu bar customization tool

  • hidden

    An ultra-light MacOS utility that helps hide menu bar icons

  • BlackHole

    BlackHole is a modern macOS audio loopback driver that allows applications to pass audio to other applications with zero additional latency.

  • InfluxDB

    Collect and Analyze Billions of Data Points in Real Time. Manage all types of time series data in a single, purpose-built database. Run at any scale in any environment in the cloud, on-premises, or at the edge.

  • tip

    Programmable tooltip that can be used with any Mac OS app

    Alternatively, you can program Tip (https://github.com/tanin47/tip, disclaimer: I'm the creator) to popup relevant menu items based on the text you currently select.

    I've been using this at work hundreds of times every day for years now. I'd love anyone to try it out.

  • hammerspoon

    Hammerspoon script (by jemmyw)

    You'll be disappointed because my use case is pretty simple - move the dock, remaximize all windows on the main screen and move chrome to my secondary screen.

    https://github.com/jemmyw/hammerspoon/blob/main/init.lua

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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