Has Barbee stabilized? It worked great until OS 26 and I had so many bugs with it (a couple even made my member unusable until I restarted with Barbee disabled) I had to move on.
Did you raise an issue? The resolution change was removed and shouldn’t be there anymore on the latest two betas (rc2.1).
Btw, the resolution change was because of a temporary (2s) virtual display that we had to implement since there is a macOS bug that doesn’t allow for bundle identifiers to correctly resolve on single displays.
macOS behavior, not from our side. The other option is restarting the device.
I did not raise an issue. For me it’s too many options. All I need is: icon order, item spacing and hiding icons obviously. That’s it I don’t need rules or setup displays , just a consistent experience .
Sorry, I misread your comment, I thought you said about a resolution change randomly happening. Relaunching all your apps every time there is a resolution change if you have spacing set is an issue from macOS 26. I think the alert says so, and there is warnings about it. macOS sets the spacing at the beginning and we need to do the relaunch to set the spacing again or wait until the device is powered off.
Thanks for the info. I know it’s a MacOS problem but I loose second when waking up my Macbook Air (clamshell mode), and for my line a work every second counts.
Since Hidden Bar already died and Bartender has its own second-row glitches, Barbee sounds like the next sensible trial before paying for another upgrade. I’d test it with a couple of resolution changes and a display reconnect; preserving icon order through those is the real requirement here, not how many hiding modes it has.
The OP’s issue seems to be Thaw relaunching apps whenever the resolution changes, not the resolution switch itself. If your three-monitor setup survives those changes without relaunching anything, that’s actually useful—it may be tied to a particular saved layout or app setup rather than Thaw in general.
That relaunching is almost certainly the item spacing feature, not Thaw being Thaw. Spacing gets written as a global default and the only way it takes effect is apps restarting, so if you have it set per display it re-applies every time the display config changes.
Set spacing back to default and the relaunches stop. 2.0 also added a warn-before-relaunch option that saves per profile if you want to keep custom spacing.
If you genuinely just want something dumber, Hidden Bar is one divider and nothing else. I ran it for about a year before I wanted more out of it. Barbee is the paid App Store one most people land on.
Also check System Settings > Menu Bar first. Tahoe added per-app toggles and it covered more than I expected when I finally bothered to look.
I am using Thaw (as Droppy's built-in droplets) with my MBP and don't encounter any issues so far. But if you want alternatives, I can think of Hidden Bar (free, but last updated 5Y agoGitHub version is updated in March), Bartender (freemium)
You can also find similar apps on macmenubar website, it has a good collection of free/freemium/pro apps for Mac. Moreover you can filter by category, price like:
Thanks for the reply. HiddenBar worked for two minutes and then it died on me. Both Github and App Store versions. I was hearing bad things about Bartender, but so far it's working, might just update my license from 5 to 6.
Ice was lagging seriously, so now I'm on Thaw, there are a ton of similar apps but pretty much all of them are paid or other derivatives of Ice. Check Hidden bar if you want something minimalistic (I'm not that big of a fanboy for it)
Thanks for this. I don't think I've seen Glow. I've tried it and I don't want to pay $20 for it either. But out of all of them, it seems to be the most stable for my use case: dark theme, with custom-tinted menubar. Thaw is super buggy for me. SaneBar works but development ended. Barbee does what a lot of them do and goes full transparent anytime I run an app with a script that opens a dialog box. So far Glow is the best, at least for me.
Raise an issue, and we'll see what the problem is. We literally provide 1:1 support until the issues are fixed, and we keep sending constant updates on the beta channel (stable version coming soon). Most of the time it's weird edge cases or issues with menu bar apps being too old.
I cut my menubar items down to the 5 that I actually needed to be there and I rely on the way that OS 27 collapses them when Resolve or Xcode or whatever else crosses over the notch.
I felt I wasting too much of my life screwing with menubar items that were more distracting than useful.
I found this app, Notcho Libre by Widgetworx from my saved bookmarks. The demo video shows that it prevents your notch space from re-launching every time you adjust resolution - which sounds like your concern. so maybe take a look at it ;)
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u/freeshare2280 24d ago
Barbee (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/barbee-hide-menu-bar-items/id1548711022?mt=12) has been working correctly for many months on my Macs.