Barr clears space in your macOS menu bar by moving the apps you choose into a compact dropdown shelf. Your apps keep running, their icons stay within reach, and everything else remains in the native menu bar. It is especially useful on MacBooks where the notch leaves little room for status items.

How it works

1. Open Choose Apps and select the menu bar items you want Barr to hold.
2. Barr hides those items from the menu bar and mirrors them in its shelf.
3. Click Barr's three-line icon to open the shelf, then click any item to use it normally. You can move an item back to the menu bar at any time.

Barr needs Screen Recording to mirror each selected icon and Accessibility to move and activate the original status item. Processing stays on your Mac.

Install

Install with Homebrew:

brew tap zackbart/tap
brew install --cask barr

Or grab the latest Barr.dmg from Releases. Barr is a menu-bar utility (LSUIElement) and does not appear in the Dock.

Repo layout

app/                  XcodeGen project, Swift sources, and app assets
.github/workflows/    Tag-driven release automation
CHANGELOG.md           Release history and notable changes
README.md             Project overview

Develop

brew install xcodegen
cd app
xcodegen generate && open Barr.xcodeproj

app/project.yml is the source of truth; the generated Xcode project is ignored. Requires macOS 14+ and Xcode 16+.

Implementation note

macOS has no public API for re-parenting another app's status item. Barr mirrors selected icons, parks their original status-item windows beyond the visible menu bar, and temporarily restores an original when you activate it. It uses private WindowServer functions and is intended for direct distribution rather than the Mac App Store. See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

Releasing

Releases are tag-driven. Push a v* tag to build, sign, notarize, and publish a stable Barr.dmg asset:

git tag v0.1.0
git push origin v0.1.0

The release workflow expects the same Apple signing secrets used by the other Cursor Kittens macOS apps. GitHub secrets are repository-scoped, so add these to zackbart/barr before pushing the first tag:

• BUILD_CERTIFICATE_BASE64
• P12_PASSWORD
• APPLE_TEAM_ID
• AC_API_KEY_BASE64
• AC_API_KEY_ID
• AC_API_ISSUER_ID

License

MIT — see LICENSE.