Tiroir
Tiroir sorts the icons crowding your menu bar into drawers, one icon each: the menu bar keeps what you look at all day, and everything else waits one click away.
How it works
Tiroir finds out which app owns each icon, proposes a drawer for every kind of thing you run, and lets you change anything before a single icon moves.
1
On first launch, Tiroir finds every icon in your menu bar and proposes drawers by purpose. You see the result before it applies.
2
Drag an icon to another drawer, rename a drawer or give it another icon. Keep in the menu bar whatever you look at all day.
3
It drops in a glass panel with each app's icon and name. Click one and its own menu opens, as if it had never moved.
Smart Sort
Smart Sort knows 244 menu bar apps by name. It finds out which app owns each icon, looks up its purpose and proposes the drawers in one click. New icons sort themselves.
Drawers
Click a drawer and a glass panel drops under it, each app shown with its own icon and name. Click one and the icon's real menu opens.
Profiles and triggers
Keep one setup for the laptop and one for the desk, and let Tiroir switch between them, show a drawer or turn on Focus while something is true.
Settings
Layout draws your menu bar at its real size, the notch included, with the room left beside it. Appearance tints it, floats it or splits it in two.
Each drawer shows a monochrome icon, drawn like the rest of your menu bar, with its name or its count if you like. A drawer can also show an emoji or a few letters, if you prefer.
Search, the All drawer, Show Every Icon, Focus, each drawer, each profile, and any single icon, whose menu opens wherever it lives.
Next to Control Center by default, its icon then your drawers in the order you set. Or place them yourself with a Command-drag.
English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, following the language of your Mac.
Every control has a name for VoiceOver, the keyboard reaches everything, and panels follow Reduce Motion, Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast.
Export your drawers, profiles and settings, and import them on another Mac. For a bug report, Copy Diagnostics gathers what helps, and sends nothing.
Your Mac
macOS 27 rebuilt the menu bar, so Tiroir carries an engine for each version. It picks the right one at launch, and Settings tells you which one runs.
macOS 26 Tahoe
Tiroir keeps an invisible divider in your menu bar and moves icons behind it with Command-drags, as you would by hand. The pointer is hidden while icons move, then put back.
macOS 27 Golden Gate Beta
macOS 27 draws the whole menu bar itself, and apps can no longer move its icons. Tiroir asks macOS to show every app except those in drawers. It never moves the pointer.
16MB
What Tiroir uses while it waits. Settings shows the live figure.
0
No polling: Tiroir wakes when an app starts or quits, a display changes, or you click. A time trigger sets one alarm for its next change.
1permission
Never Screen Recording, never Input Monitoring.
1connection
Which you can turn off. Nothing else leaves your Mac.
Memory measured with scripts/bench.sh on a MacBook Pro with M3 Pro and macOS 26.5, after one idle minute. Every Mac that runs macOS 26 or 27, Apple silicon and Intel; Intel Macs stop at macOS 26. With a notch, Tiroir measures the room beside it. With several displays, a drawer opens on the one you clicked.
Side by side
As of September 2026, from each app's website, repository and release notes. Where we could not confirm a detail, the table says so.
| Feature | Tiroir | Bartender 6 | Bartender 7 | Ice | Thaw | Hidden Bar |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | $20 | $24.99, or $19.99 a year | Free | Free | Free |
| License | MIT | Closed | Closed | GPL-3.0 | GPL-3.0 | MIT |
| macOS 26 Tahoe | Yes | Yes | Not yet | Beta only | Yes | Yes |
| macOS 27 Golden Gate | Beta | No | Yes | No | Alpha | Yes, per app |
| Groups as one icon | Yes | Yes | Not on macOS 27 | No | No | No |
| Automatic sorting | Smart Sort | No | No | No | No | No |
| Profiles | Yes | Presets | Yes | Planned | Yes | No |
| Triggers | Yes | Yes | Yes | Planned | Yes | No |
| Search | Yes | Yes | Not verified | Yes | Yes | No |
| Space between icons | macOS 26 | Yes | Not verified | Beta | Yes | No |
| Menu bar shapes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Screen Recording | Not needed | Required | Optional | Optional | Optional | Not needed |
Swipe the table to see every app.
Bartender 6 and 7, Ice, Thaw and Hidden Bar as of September 2026. “Not verified” means we could not confirm it either way. Ice's last stable release dates from October 2024; Thaw is a fork of Ice. Corrections are welcome on GitHub.
Privacy
Tiroir needs to know which app owns each icon, and nothing else.
Accessibility, to see which app owns each icon and to open it for you. Never Screen Recording, never Input Monitoring.
Tiroir never takes a picture of your menu bar. Drawers show each app's own icon, read from the app itself.
No account, no analytics, no crash reports. The only connection is the update check, and you can turn it off.
Open source
Tiroir is MIT licensed: read exactly what runs on your Mac, change it, ship your own. Issues and pull requests are welcome.
Native Swift and SwiftUI with strict concurrency. Sparkle, for updates, is the only dependency.
Read it, change it, ship your own. The whole license fits in three paragraphs.
Hiding the pointer on macOS 26 and the menu bar of macOS 27 need a few private functions. They all live in PrivateAPI.swift and are looked up at run time: if one disappears, only its feature turns off.
Smart Sort and the layout planner are tested on their own, the engines against fake menu bars, and guard tests keep networking and screen capture out of the code.
Smart Sort starts from a list of menu bar apps and their drawers. Is yours missing, or in the wrong drawer? Add its bundle identifier to Catalog.json and open a pull request.
"apps": {
"com.docker.docker": "developer",
"com.getdropbox.dropbox": "files",
"com.example.yourapp": "utilities"
}Yes. No trial, no subscription, no account: Tiroir is free and open source under the MIT License.
Yes, in beta. macOS 27 draws the menu bar itself and only lets apps hide whole apps, so there an app with two icons hides both, and Tiroir never moves the pointer. While icons are hidden, macOS 27 also hides Focus and the camera and microphone indicators.
macOS 27 only lets apps in the Applications folder change the menu bar: Tiroir offers to move itself there.
To see which app owns each icon, and to open an icon's menu for you. macOS only shares both with apps you allow in System Settings, Privacy & Security, Accessibility. Tiroir asks for nothing else: never Screen Recording, never Input Monitoring.
No. At rest Tiroir polls nothing: it wakes when an app starts or quits, when a display changes, or when you click, and a time trigger sets one alarm for its next change. Its memory at rest is in the Your Mac section above, and Settings, General shows the live figure.
Every icon comes back. On macOS 26 the invisible divider that hides them leaves the menu bar with Tiroir; on macOS 27, macOS drops Tiroir's request as soon as Tiroir stops. On macOS 26 the order of your icons stays as Tiroir left it, as if you had arranged them yourself.
On macOS 26, yes: Wi-Fi, Battery, Sound and the other Control Center icons can go into a drawer like any other. macOS keeps the clock and Control Center itself in place. On macOS 27, Apple's own icons cannot be hidden, so they stay in the menu bar.
No. Tiroir never asks for Screen Recording and never takes a picture of your menu bar. Through Accessibility it reads each icon's app, position and label, and drawers show the apps' own icons, read from the apps themselves.
Tiroir gathers icons into drawers, each shown in the menu bar as a single icon, proposes those drawers itself, and works on macOS 26 and 27 with Accessibility alone. Profiles, triggers, search, shapes and the space between icons are there too. It is free and MIT licensed. Bartender is paid and closed, and version 6 needs Screen Recording; Ice no longer works on macOS 27. The table above compares them line by line.
Yes, with triggers. While an app is open or in front, the Mac runs on battery, an external display is connected, during the hours you choose or while the camera or the microphone is in use, Tiroir can switch to a profile, show a drawer or a single icon, or turn on Focus. When the condition ends, the menu bar goes back.
Tiroir speaks English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, and follows the language of your Mac.
Right-click any drawer and choose Quit Tiroir: every icon comes back. Then move Tiroir to the Trash, or run brew uninstall --cask tiroir if you installed it with Homebrew. Its settings live in one preferences file, ch.rubencatalao.tiroir.
Yes, please. Smart Sort starts from a catalog of 244 menu bar apps, kept in one JSON file in the repository. Add your app's bundle identifier and its drawer and open a pull request, or open an issue with the app's name.
Free, open source, and sorted in a minute.
macOS 26 Tahoe or macOS 27 Golden Gate (beta) Apple silicon and Intel Signed and notarized. Updates arrive through the app, when you allow them.
Or install it with Homebrew: brew install --cask ruben4reall/tap/tiroir