Ready for macOS 26 (Tahoe) Edward — a cartoon bartender holding a martini

Tame your Mac menu bar.

Edward hides, shows, and searches your macOS menu bar items — so a crowded menu bar stays exactly as tidy as you want it. Free and open source.

Download for macOS View on GitHub

Notarized · auto-updates via Sparkle · macOS 14+ · GPL-3.0 · a personal fork of Ice

What it does

A more versatile menu bar

Everything you'd want from a menu bar manager, tuned to keep working on the latest macOS.

Hide & show items

Tuck menu bar icons into a hidden section and reveal them on click — reclaim the space up top.

Always-hidden section

A second, deeper section for the icons you rarely need — option-click to peek when you do.

Menu bar search

A quick search panel to jump straight to any menu bar item by name — no more hunting.

Custom hotkeys

Bind keyboard shortcuts to toggle sections and open search, so your hands never leave the keys.

Appearance & rehide

Style the bar to taste and choose when items automatically hide again — on a timer, on focus, or never.

Tahoe-ready

Runs great on macOS 26 (Tahoe), where the last upstream Ice release broke — Edward ships with the fixes built in.

Get it running

Installed in seconds

Signed, notarized, and self-updating — no Xcode required. Edward installs alongside Ice with its own bundle id, so an existing Ice setup is untouched.

  1. Download Edward and unzip it by double-clicking in Finder.
  2. Drag Edward.app into your Applications folder and open it.
  3. That's it — Edward lives in your menu bar and keeps itself up to date automatically.
First launch: Edward is signed and notarized by Apple, but because it's distributed outside the App Store, macOS shows a one-time prompt ("Apple could not verify Edward is free of malware") the first time you open it. To get past it, open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click Open Anyway. You only do this once.
Tip: unzip with Finder (double-click) and don't use a third-party unarchiver — some break the app's signature and cause a "damaged / unverified" error.
Download Edward Prefer to build from source?

Privacy

No tracking. No phone-home.

Edward is a local utility. It collects nothing about you, your menu bar, or your Mac — and there's no analytics, telemetry, or crash reporting anywhere in the app.

One connection, to check for updates

The only time Edward reaches the network is its Sparkle update check — and it talks solely to theedward.app to see if a newer version exists. Nothing about you is sent.

You're in control

Prefer zero outbound traffic? Turn off automatic update checks in Edward's settings. And because it's open source, you can verify every line yourself.

Full details in the privacy section of the README.

Standing on the shoulders of Ice

Edward is a personal, rebranded fork of Ice by Jordan Baird and its contributors — all credit for the original work goes to them. Like Ice, Edward is released under the GPL-3.0 license.