The menu bar manager for macOS

Tame your menu bar — back on modern macOS

Ice 2 hides the menu bar items you don't need, brings them back when you want them, and lets you lay the bar out your way. A faithful, open-source rebuild — now running on macOS 26 and 27.

Latest 2 macOS · 7 languages · 3 channels

See it in action

Hide menu bar items

Tuck rarely-used icons behind a divider so the bar stays clean.

The Ice Bar

Move hidden items into a separate bar that appears on demand.

Show on demand

Reveal items with a click, a hotkey, or by hovering the edge.

What's new

Plain-language notes, newest first.

2.10.0
Uninstalling Ice 2 has moved out of the menu bar and into Settings. · Where it is now. Removing Ice 2 used to be an Uninstall item in the Ice 2 menu that opened a separate window. It is now the last pane in the Settings sidebar, under Uninstall, and the confirmation appears right there in the pane. · The menu item is gone. An unrecoverable action does not belong one click away from Quit in the everyday menu. Settings ▸ Uninstall is now the way to remove Ice 2 from inside the app. · What gets removed is unchanged. The app and its login item, your settings, layout profiles, and hotkeys, and Ice 2's saved application state.
2026-08-04 · View on GitHub →
2.9.11
Ice 2 now looks at your screen only when it actually has a reason to. · Why it was looking so often. To draw a menu bar shape, remove the menu bar background, or round the screen corners, Ice 2 needs to know what your wallpaper looks like behind the menu bar — and macOS never tells apps when the wallpaper changes, so Ice 2 has to re-check every five seconds. · What's better now. It no longer checks while your display is asleep or your screen is locked, and it no longer checks at all if your menu bar appearance only adds a tint, a border, or a shadow, since those never use the wallpaper. If you use a menu bar shape, it still refreshes exactly as before whenever your screen is on. · About the "Ice 2 is accessing your screen" notification. macOS counts every one of those checks under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen & System Audio Recording, which is how the total could reach tens of thousands in a month; it should climb far more slowly now. Ice 2 has never recorded audio — macOS bundles screen and audio into a single permission — and only ever captures the menu bar strip and the wallpaper directly behind it.
2026-08-01 · View on GitHub →

Auto-generated from GitHub Releases

Measured, not marketing

Light on your battery

Idle CPU with Ice 2 sitting in the menu bar and no windows open, averaged over a 10-minute sample. Recent 2.8.x releases cut it by about 85%.

Ice 2 idle CPU by version
VersionIdle CPU (avg)Peak
2.8.45.58%9.2%
2.8.52.47%3.0%
2.8.60.81%1.7%

≈85% less idle CPU than 2.8.4 — now under 1%.

Ways to get it

Terminal · one command

Homebrew

brew install --cask teddychan/tap/ice-2
Coming soon

Mac App Store

Coming soon
Support development

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Need help?

I maintain Ice 2 for free in my spare time. Questions, bug reports and feature requests are genuinely welcome — open an issue on GitHub and I'll take a look.

Open an issue on GitHub

In tribute

Ice 2 is an independent, open-source rebuild of Ice, the menu bar manager originally created by Jordan Baird. This fork, actively maintained by Teddy Chan, carries it forward to modern macOS.

Latest 2 macOS 7 languages 3 channels Free and open source
Why I build & maintain these →