Lifestyle plugins for BitBar – Put anything in your Mac OS X menu bar | Hacker News Reader

Lifestyle plugins for BitBar – Put anything in your Mac OS X menu bar

getbitbar.com

107 pointsolds0ul28 comments

I find it interesting how much stuff people like putting in their menu bar. Maybe it’s because I have a laptop with a small screen, but I always like mine to be neat and tidy, with only a couple of items I use every day. Most people I know have a bunch of junk like Adobe or Dropbox or Norton in theirs, though, and I doubt they click on any of those ever. There’s also a proliferation of so-called menu-bar apps.

I use an app called Bartender that allows me to manage mine to keep everything tidy - it has helped keep things clean and usable for me. before that, whenever I had a program that used a lot of menu space, there would be conflicts.

I’m the same, in fact, I use an app which aims to do the opposite to BitBar: it’s called BarTender, and it lets you hide any menu bar items under a single drop down. This includes items added by the system (e.g. network status, Siri).

Although I suppose you could combine BitBar and BarTender by using BitBar to add some non-standard items and BarTender to hide them until you decide to expand them.

Checking this out now! Hate the clutter. Thanks for the tip.

Installed. If you were here I'd give you a dollar. Best ever.

Same, I need the space for those beautiful iStat menus

This is exactly what I do. I hid everything from the menu bar and replaced them with custom (smaller) clock and battery percentage items, along with a few additional things I like to see.

Bartender is a must have on MacOS in my opinion with, or without, a bitbar or similar.

I use Bitbar to add custom widgets, then Bartender to remove all the nonsense I don't want.

I think this is the strategy. Going to check it out. You guys made my day.

I do the same, I have the "kinda nice to have in the menubar but not forever" stuff set to stay there for N minutes on update.

Things like the battery for example, doesn't need to be there unless its changing, and then only for a bit. I recommend it, bartender is the biggest thing I wish apple would sherlock into the os.

Agreed. It’s funny that not too long ago I wrote a cross platform battery status indicator[0] that I could place in my tmux status bar and not have to worry about changing my config based on what system I’m on. Coincidentally it can also be used with bitbar. However, shortly after using it I realized it was more distracting than helpful. Now I just call the script if I want to see the status. There’s also less battery anxiety this way.

[0] https://github.com/imwally/battstat

I have Notifications, Spotlight, the Clock, WiFi, a program called Vagrant Manager that some coworkers made for managing Vagrant instances, and a BitBar item for Redmine tickets (it's the plugin from the repo but I modified it quite a bit to fit my likes).

The first four are necessary (though I think I should try removing Notifications and probably Spotlight tomorrow), the latter two are huge time savers over having to open a Chrome tab to find all the issues assigned to me or running commands to figure out what boxes are active and halt them. They can be more than just a distraction like Creative Cloud, Dropbox, etc. are.

Eons ago, on a once popular site called MacHeist, I got a license of Bartender[1]. Been upgrading it since and is of the best purchases I made so far. I have just the clock[2] and the un-hidable Notification Center Icon. This is my menubar[3].

1. https://www.macbartender.com/

2. https://www.seense.com/the_clock/

3. https://www.dropbox.com/s/5lu9u25lexjinzb/Screenshot%202018-...

You can hide Notification Center (and notifications altogether) with removing it from autolaunch:

  launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist 2> /dev/null

I use Vanilla to hide the ones that aren't required a lot. It's similar to Bartender, but has a free version that works just fine for me.

I hide a bunch of bitbar apps on the menu bar; things like network status and dns switcher. Not stuff I use all the time, but good to have in an easily accessible place.

I've found Dropbox to be a great "did my internet connection just drop?" tool. I also like to know that my things are backed up (as I use Dropbox to store stuff).

Checkout IconPing by antirez, which accomplishes the same real time connectivity check without any bloat.

Thanks, but I will not be removing my Dropbox icon anyway as it has a multi purpose for me.

Love BitBar. It's SO easy to create little widgets in the menu bar. Have my own countdowns for days in the quarter etc.

To anyone trying to get more focussed and less distracted, stay away from anything like this! Keep it lean, keep it clean.

unless you are putting pomodoro timer on there :p

Why yes, thank you for the excellent segue. Pomodoro [1] is a no-frills minimal macOS app I wrote in Swift. It does its job, looks ok, and doesn't have ads.

[1]: https://github.com/apas/pomodoro

And, presumably, stop reading Hacker News comments...

Too much free time between Android builds...

I'm certainly with you in the minimalist camp. But in fact I use BitBar to add a second clock in the timezone that my company HQ is in, and it's very useful.

And for those of us running Gnome, there is p-e-w/argos[1]. Completely BitBar compatible, provided that the script don't use any OSX specific code.

1. https://github.com/p-e-w/argos

I just ran across BitBar trying to find a competent utility to simply display my currently-played iTunes track in the menu bar (this turns out to be shockingly hard to find).

It turned out to be trivial to modify one of the existing BitBar plugins to do exactly what I wanted, and very nice to have that functionality tailored. This is a really nice app.

I love apps like this. I use an app that puts my external IP in my menu bar. Perfect for knowing what VPN I'm on at a quick glance. Bartender to hide all the crap.

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