If you use a Mac, you’ve probably noticed that the menu bar fills up with icons pretty quickly. Bartender and Ice (sadly, now an unfortunate name) are apps that let you manage and hide unwanted icons from your macOS menu bar so it stays clean and uncluttered.

About a year ago, I switched from Bartender to Ice, which just happens to be open source, because there was some drama. Since then, I’ve been very happy with Ice.

A couple of months ago, I upgraded to macOS Tahoe, and my menu bar stopped working correctly. The icon colors were all this weird shade of blue, so I couldn’t customize anything. After months of trying to figure it out, I noticed that it had been a while since Ice released a new version. That’s how open source goes sometimes.

I was getting to the point of deciding whether to go back to Bartender or stick with Ice. Today, I noticed that there’s a Homebrew package for jordanbaird-ice@beta. I decided to give it a try, removed the old version, installed the beta, and to my surprise and delight, the problem was fixed.

# remove the stable version
brew remove jordanbaird-ice

# install the beta
brew install jordanbaird-ice@beta

I’m hoping there’s a more official release soon. The new Bartender looks good too, so if Ice doesn’t keep getting updated, I might switch back. If you’ve run into this same issue, give the beta a try and let me know how it goes. And if you know of any alternatives to Bartender and Ice, I’d love to hear about those too.