Ice
Ice is a macOS menu bar manager that helps you hide, show, arrange, and customize menu bar items for a cleaner desktop.
What is Ice?
Ice is a native macOS utility for managing and customizing the menu bar. It helps users hide distracting menu bar icons, reveal them on demand, and reorganize the top-of-screen layout to better fit daily workflows. The app is useful for people with crowded menu bars, including users of many background tools, status apps, and MacBook models with limited menu bar space. Ice includes controls for hidden and always-hidden sections, on-click or on-hover reveal behavior, drag-and-drop arrangement, hotkeys, and visual menu bar customization such as spacing and appearance changes. It is designed for macOS 14 and later, and is published by Jordan Baird.
Key features
- Hide menu bar items and reveal them when you need them
- Keep selected icons in an always-hidden section
- Show hidden items by clicking, hovering, scrolling, or swiping
- Rearrange menu bar items with drag-and-drop controls
- Use hotkeys to toggle sections and menu bar behaviors
- Customize menu bar appearance with spacing, tint, borders, and shapes
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Safety overview
Status: Mostly safe
Ice is a well-known open-source menu bar utility for macOS, and its purpose matches behavior such as managing menu bar items and optionally launching at login. To work fully, it may request Accessibility and Screen Recording permissions so it can read and control menu bar elements; those permissions are sensitive, so grant them only if you use the app and downloaded it from the official website or the publisher's official release. Review login item settings if you do not want it starting automatically.
Recommendation: Keep Ice if you use it to organize a crowded menu bar or customize how menu bar items behave. If you no longer use those features, you can quit it and remove it without affecting macOS itself, though your menu bar layout and Ice-specific behavior will stop working.
Common paths
/Applications/Ice.app
Cache paths
~/Library/Caches/com.jordanbaird.Ice
Support paths
~/Library/Application Support/com.jordanbaird.Ice
Preference paths
~/Library/Preferences/com.jordanbaird.Ice.plist
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