Cornice vs xbar

Cornice is a free, open-source menu bar manager for macOS. A divider hides the menu bar items to its left, and clicking it reveals them again. An optional second divider creates a section that stays hidden even when the rest of the items are revealed. Users can adjust divider thickness and height, choose among five chevron styles, and configure keyboard shortcuts and auto-hide behavior. Cornice does not move other applications’ menu bar icons, so the divider must be positioned by hand. Optional two-finger trackpad gestures on a window title bar can resize or reposition windows, or send them to the Dock. Hiding and revealing menu bar items requires no permissions; Accessibility access is requested only when those optional gestures are enabled. The interface supports sixteen languages that can be switched without restarting. The project is distributed under GPL-3.0. It costs nothing and requires macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later on Apple Silicon. Builds are signed for development but not notarised, so macOS requires a manual first launch through its warning. After an update, gesture users must grant Accessibility permission again.

xbar puts output from scripts and programs in the macOS menu bar, where selected information can be checked at a glance. Its library offers hundreds of ready-made plugins across areas such as AWS, finance, email, music, network, system, and weather. Examples include network status, YubiKey OATH TOTP codes, an OKX price ticker, Bluetooth trackpad battery status, miner statistics, and an RSS reader. Users can also write plugins in any language. The app's Preferences > Plugins view is where users can discover and manage plugins; the plugin directory is ~/Library/Application Support/xbar/plugins. xbar is free at free and open source under the MIT License. The project says Mat Ryer and Leah Anthony rewrote it in Go using Wails. The latest release requires macOS Catalina or newer (10.15 or later). Grouped and custom menu items and keyboard shortcuts are supported, but hiding or rearranging menu items is not. The v2.1.7-beta notes say the plugin timeout increased from one minute to two minutes.