There are lots of apps you can use to hide and manage the menu bar, of varying levels of complexity. While a simple tool like Hidden Bar does the job with no fuss, some users might want a few more features at their disposal.

Barbee does a lot more than just hide some menu bar icons. It can completely change the look of your menu bar, provides additional functionality not available in macOS, and allows you to create shortcuts, automations, and widgets, all while being extensively customizable.

Hiding icons is still the app’s main selling point, so we’ll start here. The classic mode simply collapses a set of items when you click or right-click the Barbee icon, with the option to separate hidden and always hidden items.

The enhanced mode displays hidden icons in a separate bar underneath the macOS menu bar. This may be preferable if you have a lot of active apps with menu bar integration, as you’ll essentially get two bars stacked on top of one another.

Setting up hidden or visible icons can be done either by holding down Cmd and dragging, or by accessing the layout section of the app’s preferences.

Appearance-wise, you can opt for a vanilla unified menu bar or one that separates the app menu from status bar icons. There are other style choices to be made, such as rounding the corners, enabling shadows, changing the tint, and so on.

If you have a notch-equipped MacBook, you can shrink usable screen space in order to hide the notch, and the gaps between menu bar items can be made smaller or removed entirely.

Barbee allows you to set up widgets that are visible on the desktop and provide the functionality of selected menu bar items. You can fine-tune both their appearance and behavior.

Global shortcuts can be created for accessing menu bar items directly, and they can even be monitored so that they are revealed automatically when any changes are detected.

Barbee is a remarkably comprehensive menu bar manager, so much so that it might be a bit confusing at first. Once you get past the initial learning curve, however, it becomes one of the best apps of its kind.