Hide the menu bar icons you rarely need — bring them back with one click or ⌥⌘B.
A pelmet is the board above a window that hides the curtain fittings. This one hides your menu bar clutter, so nothing disappears behind the MacBook notch.
Note
Status: shipping. Hide/show works with zero special permissions, and the notch-aware Shelf panel, opt-in one-click access, and opt-in show-on-hover have shipped. Profiles are next on the roadmap.
On notched MacBooks, macOS silently hides menu bar items that don't fit next to the camera housing — no overflow indicator, the icons are just gone. Pelmet gives you back control: park rarely-used icons behind a divider and summon them when you need them. And when icons still don't fit, Pelmet is the only tool that tells you — a small +3 appears next to its chevron, with tips one right-click away. No other utility detects this, and Pelmet does it with zero permissions.
Pelmet places two items in your menu bar:
[hidden icons…] ╱ [always-visible icons…] ‹ clock
│ │
separator toggle
- Pelmet hides everything to the left of the ╱ separator — ⌘-drag the icons you always want visible to its right, next to the clock.
- When collapsed, Pelmet inflates the separator's width (bounded at ~4,000 pt — macOS caps status-item windows near 5,000 pt), pushing everything left of it past the screen edge. Expand and they slide back.
- This is the same battle-tested technique used by Hidden Bar and Dozer. It needs no Screen Recording or Accessibility permission.
- If the expanded icons don't all fit beside the notch, the toggle shows a count (e.g. › +3) instead of letting them vanish without a trace. Right-click it for ways to make room. Detection uses only public window-geometry metadata — nothing that prompts for permissions or lights the screen-recording indicator.
Pelmet needs zero special permissions, has no accounts, and embeds no tracking SDKs. It makes two kinds of network calls, both under your control:
- Update checks (Sparkle): asks you once before enabling checks every 6 hours. If a scheduled check meets a temporary network failure, Pelmet performs at most three recovery checks and shows the retry state in Settings. An ↑ in the menu bar means an update is ready to review; Pelmet never installs it without your approval.
- Anonymous usage ping: one tiny event per day (app version, macOS version,
chip type, which Pelmet features are on) so we know how many people use Pelmet
and what to prioritize. No personal data, no menu bar contents, never anything
about the other apps you run; IP addresses are discarded on arrival. An in-app
notice appears before the first ping is ever sent. Turn it off in Settings,
with
defaults write com.ismatbabirli.Pelmet telemetryEnabled -bool NO, or withDO_NOT_TRACK=1.
Every field is documented in docs/TELEMETRY.md, the sending code is one small file, and the aggregate numbers are public. Crash reports never leave your Mac: after a crash, Pelmet offers to open a prefilled GitHub issue that you review and submit yourself.
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Show/hide managed icons | Click the ‹ / › toggle, or press ⌥⌘B |
| Reveal managed icons on hover | Enable Show hidden items on hover in Settings, then move the pointer into the menu bar |
| Keep an icon always visible | ⌘-drag it to the right of the ╱ divider |
| See why icons are missing | Hover or right-click the toggle when it shows +N |
| Lost the divider? | Right-click the toggle → Reset Divider Position |
| Fit more icons beside the notch | Settings → Make Room… (incl. tighter icon spacing) |
| Settings (hover, auto-rehide, launch at login) | Right-click the toggle → Settings… |
| Quit | Right-click the toggle → Quit Pelmet |
brew install --cask ismatBabirli/pelmet/pelmetThis taps ismatBabirli/homebrew-pelmet and installs the signed, notarized app
into /Applications. Upgrade later with brew upgrade --cask pelmet.
Download the latest Pelmet-<version>.dmg from the
Releases page, open it,
and drag Pelmet to Applications. Builds are signed and notarized by Apple, so
they launch with no Gatekeeper warning.
Pelmet is menu-bar-only — after launching, look next to the clock, not in the Dock.
Prefer to build it yourself? It takes under a minute.
git clone https://github.com/ismatBabirli/pelmet.git
cd pelmet
swift runThe terminal prints a startup banner, and both the ‹/› toggle and the ╱ divider appear next to the clock — always visible, never behind the notch. Building needs a Swift 6 toolchain (Xcode 16+ or recent Command Line Tools); the app itself runs on macOS 13+. Launch-at-login is the one feature that needs a real .app bundle:
brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate
open Pelmet.xcodeproj # then build & run with ⌘R- Nothing appeared in the menu bar. Pelmet's toggle and divider are seeded right next to the clock, the last spot macOS swallows, so this should be rare. If your bar is packed edge to edge, quit another menu bar app to free some space, then relaunch Pelmet.
- A number like +3 sits next to the chevron. That many icons don't fit beside the notch, so macOS is hiding them (it never says so itself). Right-click the chevron for tips: ⌘-drag important icons toward the clock, hide expendable ones behind ╱, or quit unused menu bar apps.
- I can't find the ╱ divider. Right-click the chevron → Reset Divider Position brings it back next to the toggle.
- Is it even running?
swift runprints a banner once the app is up, and pressing ⌥⌘B flips the chevron between ‹ and ›. No Dock icon or window is normal — Pelmet is a menu-bar-only app. - It quit when I closed the terminal. Under
swift runthe app belongs to your terminal session; Ctrl-C (or closing the tab) quits it. Build the .app bundle above for a standalone install. - Don't run two copies at once. Two instances fight over the same status items and saved positions. Quit the first one (right-click the chevron → Quit Pelmet, or Ctrl-C in its terminal).
- The Shelf — a blurred, rounded panel below the notch listing the icons macOS hid, opened by clicking the count (or ⌥⌘N). Rows show each item's app icon and name — never a screen capture, so no Screen Recording permission and no purple recording dot.
- One-click access — an opt-in Accessibility toggle that opens hidden items with a single click (and identifies them on macOS 26 Tahoe). Off by default; everything else works without it.
- Show on hover: reveal when the pointer touches the menu bar (opt-in)
- Profiles and per-item rules (e.g. "presentation mode")
- Custom hotkey recorder (replace the hardcoded ⌥⌘B)
- Notarized releases + Homebrew cask — a signed, notarized
.dmgon every tagged release;brew install --cask ismatBabirli/pelmet/pelmet - Reliable Sparkle updates — opt-in checks every 6 hours, bounded retry after temporary network failures, an ↑ menu-bar reminder, EdDSA-signed downloads, and explicit approval before Install and Relaunch
The full vision and phased plan live in PROJECT.md; release history is in CHANGELOG.md.
Pelmet stands on the shoulders of some excellent open-source projects:
- Ice (GPL-3.0) — the most advanced open-source option; its "Ice Bar" panel is the behavior reference for our notch panel (GPL — we reference behavior, never code)
- Hidden Bar (MIT) — origin of the expanding-spacer trick
- Dozer (MIT)
Bug reports, ideas, and small PRs are very welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for a two-minute guide and a map of the codebase.
MIT © 2026 Ismat Babirli