Tray

A tiny Bartender-style menu bar manager for macOS: hide, group, and tighten the spacing of your menu bar icons.

Features

• Hiding — click the chevron to collapse everything left of the | separator off-screen; click again to bring it back.
• Grouping — three zones: always visible, hidden, and an optional always-hidden group (behind a 👁 separator) that stays tucked away even when expanded. ⌥-click the chevron to peek at it.
• Spacing — sliders in Settings for menu bar icon spacing and padding (writes the global NSStatusItemSpacing / NSStatusItemSelectionPadding defaults).
• Launch at login — one toggle in Settings, backed by SMAppService.

Usage

1. Launch Tray — a › chevron and | separator appear in your menu bar.
2. Hold ⌘ and drag any menu bar icon to the left of the | separator.
3. Click the chevron to hide/show those icons.
4. Right-click the chevron for the menu: reveal the always-hidden group, Settings, Quit.

Spacing changes apply to each app as it restarts; log out and back in to apply them everywhere.

Building

Open tray.xcodeproj in Xcode and run, or:

xcodebuild -project tray.xcodeproj -scheme tray -configuration Release build

Requires macOS with Xcode 26+. The app is un-sandboxed on purpose — sandboxed apps can't write the global spacing defaults.

How it works

macOS has no API for moving another app's status items, so Tray uses the same trick as Hidden Bar and Dozer: it plants its own NSStatusItem separators in the bar, and "hiding" stretches a separator to 10,000 pt so everything to its left is pushed off-screen.