Veil

Hide the noise in your menu bar.

A lightweight macOS menu bar manager. Click the bolt to push cluttering items off-screen; click again to bring them back.

• Zero idle CPU. Event-driven, no polling.
• Small footprint. ~80 MB RSS, single binary, no external dependencies.
• No private APIs in the hot path. Pure AppKit + Carbon (for global hotkeys).
• MIT-licensed clean-room rewrite. Owes nothing to Ice or Bartender.

How it works

macOS Sonoma+ blocked the AX and CGS paths that previously let third-party apps move other apps' menu bar items. Veil works around that with the only technique still available: it grows its own status item to a wide push width, which shifts everything to its left off the visible portion of the menu bar. Click again to collapse the push width back to a single icon.

That model has a real constraint: hiding is all-or-nothing for items left of the bolt. Cmd+drag to reposition items in the menu bar so the ones you want to hide live left of the bolt, and the ones you always want visible (like Stats indicators) live to its right.

System items like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Battery, and Control Centre are owned by macOS itself and can only be hidden via System Settings → Control Centre. Veil can't touch them.

Install

Homebrew (Apple Silicon, macOS 14+)

brew tap zlahham/veil
brew install --cask veil

The cask strips the quarantine attribute on install so macOS doesn't block first launch.

Direct download

Or grab Veil.zip from the latest release, unzip it, and drop Veil.app into /Applications. Right-click → Open the first time to bypass Gatekeeper (the build is ad-hoc signed, not yet notarized).

From source

git clone https://github.com/zlahham/Veil.git
cd Veil
make install

make install builds with SPM, scaffolds Veil.app/ at the project root, ad-hoc codesigns it (so Accessibility grants survive rebuilds), and launches it. Requires Xcode (or the full Command Line Tools) on macOS 14+.

First launch

Veil shows a welcome window and asks for Accessibility permission. It uses this only to read the titles of menu bar items so it can list them in the Ice Bar. It does not click, modify, or send events on your behalf.

Usage

• Left-click the bolt — toggle hide/show.
• Right-click the bolt — context menu (Show Item List, Settings, Quit).
• Global hotkey — assignable in Settings → Hotkeys.
• Cmd+drag any menu bar item — reposition it. macOS persists positions; Veil works with whatever order you choose.

Item list (right-click → Show Item List)

Lists everything Veil can see in your menu bar, including the items currently pushed off-screen. Clicking a row activates the owning app.

Settings

General — pick an icon (bolt, sparkles, moon, eye, cloud), reveal-on-hover/click/scroll, auto-rehide delay, launch at login.	Hotkeys — global combo to toggle hide.

Development

swift build       # SPM build
make install      # Build + bundle + sign + launch
make icon         # Regenerate the app icon
make clean        # Remove .build/

The Makefile's make sign target ad-hoc codesigns the bundle; this keeps the same code identity across rebuilds, so macOS doesn't ask you to re-grant Accessibility every time.

Project layout

Sources/Veil/
├── App/              # AppDelegate, AppController, FirstRunWindow
├── MenuBar/          # ControlItem (the bolt), MenuBarController
├── IceBar/           # Ice Bar panel listing items
├── Events/           # Hover/click/scroll monitors
├── Hotkeys/          # Carbon-backed global hotkey service
├── Settings/         # SwiftUI Settings tabs
├── Persistence/      # UserDefaults wrapper, VeilIcon enum
└── Utilities/        # Notifications, Permissions, NSScreen helpers

License

MIT. See LICENSE.