nanobar 0.1.1

A minimal macOS menu bar manager
nanobar-0.1.1 is not a library.

nanobar

A lightweight macOS menu bar manager. Hide menu bar icons without needing a full app like Bartender or Ice.

nanobar works by creating an invisible NSStatusItem divider in your menu bar. When activated, it expands to 10000pt, pushing everything to its left off-screen. This is the same technique used by Bartender and Ice — no private APIs, no SIP disabling, no accessibility permissions.

Install

cargo install --path .

Requires macOS and Rust toolchain.

Usage

nanobar <command>

Commands

Command Description
list List all menu bar items with their positions
start Start the daemon (adds a › divider to the menu bar)
hide [apps...] Hide items to the left of the divider
show Show all hidden items
stop Stop the daemon and remove the divider
status Show current daemon state and item visibility
install Install launch agent for auto-start at login
uninstall Remove launch agent

Examples

Start the daemon — a › divider appears in your menu bar. Drag it to choose where to split visible/hidden items:

nanobar start

Hide everything to the left of the divider:

nanobar hide

Hide specific apps (moves the divider automatically):

nanobar hide Spotlight "Creative Cloud"

You can also reference items by their number from nanobar list:

nanobar list
#    App                     PID   Window       X     W
  1  Spotlight              1234    12345     200    22
  2  Creative Cloud         5678    67890     222    30  <-- divider
  ...

nanobar hide 1 2

Show all hidden items:

nanobar show

Stop the daemon and remove the divider:

nanobar stop

Auto-start

To have nanobar start automatically at login:

nanobar install

This creates a LaunchAgent at ~/Library/LaunchAgents/nanobar.plist. To remove it:

nanobar uninstall

You can also toggle this from the right-click menu (see below).

Click to Toggle

The divider works as a toggle button:

  • › (visible state) — click to hide items to its left
  • ‹ (hidden state) — click to show all items

Right-click Menu

Right-click the divider to open a context menu:

  • Start at Login — toggle auto-start (shows ✓ when enabled)
  • Quit — stop the daemon

How It Works

  1. nanobar start spawns a background daemon that creates an NSStatusItem divider (›) and an invisible pusher item
  2. The divider's position is persisted via NSStatusItem.autosaveName, so it survives restarts
  3. nanobar hide (or clicking ›) tells the daemon to expand the pusher to 10000pt, pushing left-side items off-screen, and changes the divider to ‹
  4. nanobar show (or clicking ‹) collapses the pusher back and restores the divider to ›
  5. nanobar hide <apps> reads each app's saved NSStatusItem Preferred Position from defaults and repositions the divider accordingly

The daemon communicates with the CLI over a Unix socket at /tmp/nanobar.sock. AppKit calls are dispatched to the main thread via dispatch_async_f.

Requirements

  • macOS (tested on macOS 15 Sequoia)
  • Screen Recording permission (for nanobar list to read window info via CGWindowListCopyWindowInfo)

License

MIT