Menu bar manager · macOS 26 Tahoe
A tidy menu bar. Nothing on tap.
Barback tucks away the menu bar icons you don’t need and pours them back on a hotkey, a hover, or a click — on every display at once. And it’s built with zero event taps: the WindowServer leak that makes other menu bar managers slowly cook a CPU core has nothing to leak here, because the tap was never installed.
the six on the left are clutter — press the neon chevron, or the button below
What it does
Hide the clutter. Keep the control.
Everything you kept a menu bar manager around for — rebuilt from scratch for macOS 26, without the baggage.
Three shelves, one bar
Every icon goes to Shown, Hidden, or Always hidden. One click on the chevron swaps the bar between tidy and everything — instantly, on all of your displays at once.
Back in a flash
A global hotkey, a mouse resting on the menu bar, or a click on the chevron brings hidden items back. Grab what you need; the bar tidies itself again.
Per-app rules
Show an icon only while the app that needs it is frontmost. Your screen-share icon can exist during meetings and vanish the rest of the week.
A bar for every shift
Save complete layouts and switch between them — a spare bar for presentations, a full one for deep work, a minimal one for the laptop’s notch.
Find any icon by name
A bar full of hidden items is only useful if you can reach them. Type a few letters, hit return, and Barback clicks the item for you — wherever it’s shelved.
Hands stay on the keyboard
Arrow through your menu bar items and press return to open one — no mouse, no hunting for a 22-pixel target on a 5K display.
Under the hood
Why it can’t leak.
Menu bar managers have a reputation: leave one running for a week and your fans learn its name. That reputation comes from one specific mistake — and Barback’s whole architecture is built so the mistake is impossible.
Most managers install CGEventTaps — a hook that routes every click and keystroke you make through the manager before the system sees it. When those taps back up or leak (as Bartender 6’s famously did), WindowServer queues events forever, pins a CPU core, and the whole Mac gets laggy and hot.
- ✓Zero event taps — zero. Hover and keyboard use passive observers; the hotkey is a plain system registration. Nothing sits between your input and macOS.
- ✓No window surgery. Hiding is one spacer item stretched wide — the same layout system Apple uses. Barback never fights Control Center for your icons.
- ✓Reordering is the real gesture. Moving an icon replays the exact ⌘-drag you’d make by hand — once, on demand, then it’s done.
- ✓Icons tracked properly. Items are identified through Accessibility positions, not fragile window names — so the right icon hides on every display.
You can’t leak a tap you never install. 0 CGEventTaps · 0 window moves · 0 background churn — the app idles at nothing, because idle means idle.
Requirements
What it needs.
System
macOS 26 Tahoe
Built natively for Tahoe’s menu bar — not patched around it.
Hardware
Apple Silicon
Any M-series Mac. Multiple displays fully supported.
Permission
Accessibility
Required — it’s how icons are located and moved. Nothing is logged, stored, or sent anywhere.
Price
Free
No account, no subscription, no telemetry. It’s an app, not a relationship.
Download
Get Barback.
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Download and open
Grab the zip, drag
Barback.appinto/Applications, and open it. It lives in the menu bar — no Dock icon, no window clutter. -
Grant Accessibility
macOS will ask once. This is the permission that lets Barback arrange menu bar icons; it’s required for hiding and reordering to work.
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Shelve your icons
⌘-drag icons across Barback’s separator — left of the line is hidden, right stays shown. Or assign every app from the
Itemstab in Settings. -
Forget it’s running
Set your hotkey, turn on launch at login, and that’s it. Updates arrive on their own via Sparkle. The best thing a barback can do is stay out of the way.