# SimpleTopBar

A native macOS menu bar app: a **hamburger menu** in the menu bar whose panel
collects every other app's menu bar (tray) icons, plus every app running on your
Mac, into three sections:

- **Menu Bar** — a tray of all other apps' menu bar items, discovered through
  the Accessibility API. Click one to open its real menu. Optionally **hide the
  items from the menu bar** so they only live inside this panel (best-effort;
  see below).
- **Apps** — regular apps that live in the Dock.
- **Background Apps** — accessory/agent apps without a Dock icon. This section
  is a **dropdown**: it stays collapsed to a single header, and when you expand
  it only the first few apps are shown. The rest are hidden behind a
  **Show N more** row so the list never overflows the panel.

Click any row to activate the app, or right-click for Activate / Hide / Quit.

## Accessibility permission

Collecting and opening other apps' menu bar items needs **Accessibility**
permission (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility). The panel
prompts for it; without it the Menu Bar section is empty and everything else
still works.

## Hiding menu bar items (best-effort)

macOS has no public API to move another app's status item. The **Hide items from
the menu bar** toggle uses the spacer technique: a zero-width status item is
created at launch whose length is expanded to push the other icons off-screen so
they only live in this panel. It is off by default and always undone on quit; if
the app dies, macOS removes the spacer automatically.

What it can and cannot hide:

- It hides **other third-party apps' icons** (cmux, Kapture, WireGuard, input
  source, Now Playing, …) so only your apps' icons leave the bar.
- It **keeps Wi-Fi, Spotlight, Clock, Battery and Control Center**. The spacer's
  boundary is tuned (preferred position 250) to fall just left of Wi-Fi, so the
  Apple items on the right stay visible. macOS reserves that far-right area: a
  third-party item can never be placed to the right of it, so those icons cannot
  be pushed away even in principle. (Bartender and Ice hit the same wall and
  cover the area with their own overlay bar instead.)
- Newly launched apps are placed to the left of the spacer, so they are hidden
  automatically.
- Advanced: set `defaults write dev.tzgyn.simpletopbar debug.spacerPos -float <n>`
  to move the boundary (larger = keep more icons; > ~400 starts leaking app
  icons back into the bar).

## Install with Homebrew

```bash
brew tap TZGyn/tap https://gitea.tzgyn.dev/TZGyn/homebrew-tap.git
brew trust TZGyn/tap
brew install --cask simpletopbar
```

The tap is hosted on Gitea, so the full URL is required. Homebrew may print an
"Unsupported tap" warning — it's harmless.

## Upgrade

```bash
brew update
brew upgrade --cask simpletopbar
```

If Gatekeeper still blocks the app after upgrading (it is not notarized yet):

```bash
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/SimpleTopBar.app
```

## Build from source

```bash
swift build                 # debug build
swift run SimpleTopBar      # run from terminal (app appears in the menu bar)
swift run SimpleTopBar --self-test   # headless check of the dropdown logic
./build-app.sh 0.2.0        # release build + SimpleTopBar.app bundle + icon + codesign
./release.sh 0.2.0          # build-app.sh + dist/SimpleTopBar.zip + sha256
```

## Around the Background dropdown

The background section is collapsed by default. Expanding it reveals
`AppListModel.backgroundPageSize` (5) apps at a time; when more are running a
**Show N more** button reveals the next page. Collapsing resets the page.

## Releases

`./release.sh <version>` builds and zips the app to `dist/SimpleTopBar.zip` and
prints its sha256. Tag `v<version>`, attach the zip to a release on the Gitea
repo, and bump `version`/`sha256` in the cask in
[TZGyn/homebrew-tap](https://gitea.tzgyn.dev/TZGyn/homebrew-tap).