Dimble

Dimble hides the icons you don't need until you do. Hover, click or press a shortcut and they slide back in, or open in a panel. Small on purpose (three sections, an editor, ⌘-drag in the bar) and native all the way down. macOS does the hiding. Built for the menu bar Apple rebuilt in macOS 27. Free, open source, no account, no analytics.

Beta channel. Fixes and new features land there first, a stable release rolls them up every week or two. Turn on "Get beta releases" in Settings › About, or download the latest beta:

Collapsed, and a hover later.

Choose what stays

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): the editor is a drawing, and Apply lays the bar out to match it in one pass, or Discard puts the drawing back. Or skip the window entirely and ⌘-drag icons across the chevron right in the menu bar. Dimble records the move and never moves an icon on its own.

The layout editor is a drawing. Drag icons between Visible, Hidden and Always Hidden; nothing moves in the bar until you press Apply.

Apply reveals what it needs, lays the whole bar out in one pass with the pointer hidden for a moment, and reports what it did next to the button. On a full bar it opens macOS's own « for an icon drawn behind it, moves it, and closes the « again. A "New items" tile shows where icons Dimble has never seen will land. Upgrading from 0.2.x keeps your bar as it is: if the stored order differs from the screen, it shows up once as a pending edit. And a pending update shows as a banner on every Settings pane, with a daily reminder until you install it.

System icons hide too. Sound, Battery and friends behave like any other icon. The few macOS protects (Clock, Control Center) are shown locked in the editor rather than pretended away, and anything macOS groups together gets an honest badge instead of a fake handle. Siri and Time Machine, which macOS only hides as a pair, come as Dimble's own items so each can go wherever you like.

Reveal on your terms

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. The keyboard works too, from any app. ⌥⌘, shows the hidden icons and ⌃⌥⌘, brings the always-hidden ones with them (you can change