Pelmet hides the icons you don't need until you do. Hover, click or press a shortcut and they slide back in. Apple rebuilt the menu bar from the ground up in macOS 27, and Pelmet is written for that new architecture from day one, which is why hiding feels like part of the system: no overlay windows, no fake bars, no icons jumping when the bar reflows. Free and open source.
Collapsed, and a hover later.
Three sections, one rule: Visible is always there, Hidden comes back on a hover or a click, and Always Hidden only appears when you ask for it (double-click or ⌥-click the chevron). Arrange them in the layout editor (real app-icon previews, drag-and-drop ordering), or skip the window entirely and ⌘-drag icons across the chevron right in the menu bar. Pelmet adopts the move either way.
The layout editor. Drag icons between Visible, Hidden and Always Hidden.
System icons hide too. Sound, Battery and friends behave like any other icon. The few macOS protects (Clock, Control Center, Siri) are shown locked in the editor rather than pretended away, and anything macOS groups together gets an honest badge instead of a fake handle.
Every way back in is a setting: hover (with a delay from 0.1 to 0.5 seconds), a click on empty menu bar space, a double-click for the always-hidden section, or the chevron itself. Pick how it looks (Instant, Smooth or Fade) and how it ends, either auto-rehide after a delay you set (instant to 5 seconds) or the moment you click somewhere else.
Your rules for revealing, and for putting everything back.
- Per-display behavior. Set a display to always show everything or to collapse. Whichever display your pointer is on wins.
- Built-in replacements. Media controls, AirDrop, camera/mic indicator and Shortcuts items that survive hiding, since macOS temporarily removes its own extras while hiding is active.
- Separators. Visual dividers that behave like icons, with adjustable opacity. ⌘-drag them anywhere in the bar.
- Nothing to phone home about. No account, no analytics, no server. The only connection Pelmet ever makes is checking for its own updates.
- Signed updates. Sparkle with EdDSA signatures, checked against a signed appcast.
- Your icon, or none. Six menu bar icon styles (chevron, arrow, eye, dots, grid, panel), or turn the icon off entirely and reach Settings by shortcut or right-click.
- Speaks your language. English, German, French, Spanish, Italian,
Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean and Russian.
Pelmet follows your system language, or pick one in Settings › General ›
Language. Translations are machine-drafted for now, corrections are welcome
in
scripts/gen-xcstrings.py.
General. Pick the icon Pelmet wears, or your language.
macOS 27's menu bar can hide items natively. It's the mechanism behind the system's assessment (exam lockdown) mode. Pelmet drives that mechanism directly. It asserts a configuration listing what should stay visible, and macOS itself hides the rest and reflows the bar. That's why hiding feels like part of the system. It is the system.
The catch: this API lives in a private Apple framework
(MenuBarClientCore). It isn't documented or guaranteed, so a macOS update
could change or remove it. Pelmet resolves it at runtime and fails soft. If the
API ever disappears, Pelmet simply reports hiding as unavailable rather than
breaking your menu bar. Everything else (item positions, clicks, previews)
uses public APIs: Accessibility and ScreenCaptureKit.
Download the latest DMG from Releases, drag Pelmet to Applications, and launch it. Or with Homebrew:
brew install fif7y/tap/pelmetRequires macOS 27 (Golden Gate). Earlier versions of macOS use a different menu bar architecture that Pelmet doesn't target.
On first launch Pelmet asks for one permission:
- Accessibility (required). How Pelmet sees the menu bar's items and positions, and how clicking a hidden item works without revealing everything.
Screen Recording is optional and never prompted for during onboarding. If granted, Pelmet uses it to paint solid cover strips over the bar while items swap during reveals and reorders. Without it, transitions simply run uncovered.
Pelmet is notarized by Apple and ships with the hardened runtime. It isn't sandboxed, managing the menu bar requires APIs the App Store sandbox forbids.
More in the FAQ.
Requires Xcode with the macOS 27 SDK and xcodegen.
git clone https://github.com/fif7y/pelmet.git
cd pelmet
xcodegen
xcodebuild -project Pelmet.xcodeproj -scheme Pelmet -configuration Release buildThe engine logic lives in two local Swift packages, Packages/PelmetCore
(section model, rehide state machine) and Packages/PelmetEngine (menu bar
convergence), each with its own test suite:
swift test --package-path Packages/PelmetCore
swift test --package-path Packages/PelmetEngineUI strings live in Pelmet/Resources/Localizable.xcstrings, generated from
the translation table in scripts/gen-xcstrings.py. Edit the script, re-run
it, commit both. English keys must match the code literals exactly.
pelmet (n.), a narrow border of cloth or wood, fitted across the top of a window to conceal the curtain fittings. Now also the same thing, for your menu bar.
Pelmet was inspired by Ice, the open-source menu bar manager for earlier versions of macOS. Apple's macOS 27 rebuild of the menu bar doesn't carry the old architecture forward, so Ice and the other managers built on it stop working there. Pelmet takes over from macOS 27 on, rebuilt from scratch for the new architecture (no code is shared between the projects).
Pelmet's only third-party dependency is Sparkle (in-app updates), used under the MIT-style Sparkle license. Everything else is custom code on top of Apple's system frameworks.
© 2026 Gabriel Faucon. Licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. Use it, fork it. Distributed derivatives must remain open under the same license.
Pelmet is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple Inc. Apple, macOS, and the Mac are trademarks of Apple Inc.