Ice 2 vs SwiftBar

Ice 2 is a free macOS app for hiding, arranging, and revealing menu bar items. It can tuck rarely used icons behind a divider; hidden items can be brought back with a click, hotkey, or by hovering over the edge. Its Ice Bar places hidden items in a separate bar that appears when needed. On macOS 27, a layout editor lets users drag apps into Visible, Hidden, or Always-Hidden sections, saving changes as they are made. Some functions are unavailable on that system: the separate Ice Bar, searching for one menu bar icon, and temporarily showing one icon. Ice 2 requires macOS 26 or later, and Accessibility permission may be needed on macOS 27 to find and hide menu bar apps. The app is open source under GPLv3 and is available through GitHub releases and Homebrew; the Mac App Store is listed as coming soon. The plan is free. Its maintainer is Teddy Chan, and the maker directs questions, bug reports, and feature requests to GitHub or email.

SwiftBar displays the output of custom scripts in the macOS menu bar and turns it into interactive menus. Plugins can be written in Bash, Python, Ruby, Swift, or JavaScript; SwiftBar runs them on a user-defined schedule and builds menu items from their output. Menus can include icons, colors, dropdowns, submenus, and click actions. Items can open URLs, run shell scripts, refresh plugins, or use keyboard shortcuts. Refresh intervals can be set in plugin filenames or with cron syntax in metadata. SwiftBar includes a plugin repository through its Get Plugins menu, and its product page describes hundreds of community-created plugins. Its plugin API is adopted from BitBar, allowing existing BitBar and xbar plugins to run. SwiftBar also supports plugins made with the macOS Shortcuts app and provides a settings interface for their refresh schedule. It is a free, open source project by Ameba, licensed under MIT. SwiftBar requires macOS 12 or later and is available as a direct download or through Homebrew.