A Bartender alternative that shows your icons instead of hiding them

What Bartender gets right

Bartender has been the name in menu bar managers for years, and it earned that. It is mature, it is deeply configurable, and it handles the fiddly edge cases that take ages to get right. Bartender 6 even tends the notch now. If what you want is a tidy bar with a lot of control over exactly what shows and when, it is a safe pick, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Where ChocolateBar takes a different turn

I built ChocolateBar because I did not actually want fewer icons. I wanted to still see the ones the notch had swallowed. So instead of tucking an icon behind a chevron, ChocolateBar can drop it into a second strip right under the menu bar, full size, where you can read it and click it.

That strip also does something Bartender does not. It can show your open app windows. Click Telegram in the row and you are in Telegram, no Cmd-Tab, no Mission Control. Plenty of people find the app row busy at first, so it is a toggle. Switch it off and you are left with a clean line of menu bar icons and nothing else. That row is also the part I am improving most right now, so it keeps getting cleaner and more configurable with each update.

A few smaller things worth knowing:

• ChocolateBar is paid once. No subscription, no upgrade fee down the road.
• Its only network access is the check for a new version. No telemetry, no analytics, and it is notarized by Apple.
• When you click an icon in the strip, it clicks the real menu bar item through the Accessibility API. The strip is your actual menu, not a screenshot of it.

Honestly, Bartender is the bigger, older app with more knobs to turn. ChocolateBar is the one that gives those icons somewhere to live out in the open. If "I just want to see my stuff" sounds more like you than "I want it all tucked away," that is the gap between us.