This free app finally fixes the Mac menu bar

I can’t stand a cluttered Mac menu bar. I hate visual distractions in my workspace—I want as few icons in the top-right corner as possible.

Apple doesn’t make this kind of thing easy. A free app called Chest does, and—unlike certain alternative applications—doesn’t record your screen. 

Software like this shouldn’t be necessary—the operating system should just work this way. Microsoft solved this issue completely way back in 2009. Windows 7 made it easy for users to hide tray icons they don’t like—just drag them to a secondary box. 

But Apple still doesn’t offer anything remotely similar to this. A year ago it added a feature to disable any icon in System Settings, but there’s no secondary tray. What if you want to see an icon only occasionally? 

There have been countless third-party applications offering to do it over the years, all using workarounds. Most used some kind of screen recording to get the job done, meaning a purple dot was near-constantly in the top-right corner to indicate that your screen was being recorded. That’s annoying, not to mention a security concern. How is this the solution? 

Well, there’s a better one now. Chest is free, open source, and doesn’t constantly take screenshots of your screen.  The application instead uses the built-in option to hide icons while still making them easy to access when you want to. It also doesn’t do anything else—there’s no menu bar theming, no complex customizations—which, to me, is perfect. Install it if you want a no-drama way to hide menu bar icons. Note that it requires macOS 27.

Install and run Chest and you’ll see a dot in your menu bar. You can drag menu bar icons while holding the command key. You can put them to the left of the dot and they’ll stay hidden until you need them. Or, if you prefer, you can drag icons to the “chest” and you’ll get a Windows-style pop-up with your icons. You can even mix the two approaches, storing some icons in the chest and some to the left of the dot.

So yeah, you can now bring your menu bar to something resembling what Microsoft started offering 17 years ago. Neat.