AlDente menu bar icon: hide it or keep it

Ten icons across the top right of the screen, and one of them belongs to a charge limiter that gets clicked maybe once a week. The obvious move is to hide it and free a slot. Before doing that, it is worth knowing that this particular icon is not only a button, and that hiding is not the only alternative to keeping it.

There are three options, not two. Remove it from the menu bar entirely, collapse it behind a menu bar organizer so it stays reachable, or leave it visible. Each costs something different.

Why the row fills up in the first place

Menu bar crowding is not caused by any single app behaving badly. It is the sum of a decade of utilities that each reasonably claim one slot: cloud storage, a password manager, two chat clients, a meeting app, a backup agent, a screenshot tool, an input source switcher, a clipboard history, and a charge limiter.

The row grows leftward from the right edge and the available width is finite. On a MacBook with a notch, items that reach the notch simply are not drawn, which is why icons appear to vanish as more apps are installed. That is a width constraint, not a fault, and it changes with the display: connecting an external monitor changes how many items fit, so the same set of apps can look different depending on where the work is happening.

macOS offers two reductions before any third party tool gets involved. Control Center settings allow individual system items such as Bluetooth, Sound and Focus to be hidden. Most third party apps have a preference to stop drawing their own item at all. Doing both first shrinks the problem, and what remains afterwards is the set worth making decisions about, of which the charge limiter is one.

The icon is a status display first

Most resident apps put a static glyph in the menu bar. It exists to be clicked. A charge limiter is different: the glyph itself changes to show what the power system is doing right now.

The published states cover four combinations of power source and battery activity.

What the icon shows	Power source	Battery
Plugged in and charging	Power supply	Charging
Plugged in, charging paused	Power supply	Neither charging nor discharging
Plugged in and discharging	Battery	Discharging
Unplugged and discharging	Battery	Discharging

That means a glance answers a question that would otherwise require opening something: has the limit been reached, is charge still climbing toward it, or is the machine deliberately draining while plugged in. Removing the icon does not remove a button. It removes an answer that currently arrives for free.

The paid tier extends this further. Power Flow, a diagram of where energy is moving, can be shown inside the menu bar popover through a setting. There is also a hardware battery percentage option, which reads the figure from the battery management system rather than the one macOS displays; the two normally differ by 2 to 7 percent. If either of those is being used, the case for keeping the icon visible is stronger.

What hiding it actually removes

The setting exists and is documented.

Open settings in AlDente. Go to the Appearance tab. Enable the setting "Hide Menubar Icon". Source: apphousekitchen.com, read September 10, 2026

The same Appearance tab has a separate switch for the Dock icon. Turning both off leaves an app that is running normally with no visible entry point anywhere on screen. Getting back in means launching it from the Applications folder.

Charge limiting continues either way. The process stays resident and the limit stays enforced. What disappears is three things: seeing at a glance whether the limit was reached, changing the limit quickly, and starting a discharge or a calibration cycle by hand.

For someone who set a number once and has not touched it since, losing those three costs nothing. For someone who raises the limit to 100 percent the night before travelling and lowers it again afterwards, that is a routine operation now buried two steps deeper.

Build the replacement path before removing anything

Hiding the icon becomes reasonable once another way in exists. Three are available.

The Dock icon. Toggled in the same Appearance tab. This trades a menu bar slot for a Dock slot, which is a real trade rather than a saving, though the Dock is easier to hit with a pointer.

Launching on demand. Spotlight or the Applications folder. Adequate when settings get touched a few times a year.

Shortcuts. The paid tier includes Apple Shortcuts support, so actions can be invoked without any visible interface. This pairs best with removal. If the only two operations that matter are set the limit to 80 and set it to 100, both can become keyboard invocable, and the icon has nothing left to do except display status.

Note the tier boundary here. On the published pricing page, customizable menu bar icons, a customizable popup window, and Shortcuts support all sit in the paid column. On the free tier the practical choice narrows to showing the icon as it comes or hiding it entirely.

The third option: collapse rather than remove

A menu bar organizer keeps the item alive and clickable while removing it from the visible row. The difference from hiding is recovery time. A hidden item requires launching the app; a collapsed item is a click away.

This suits exactly the kind of item a charge limiter is. Sort every icon in the row by click frequency and a pattern appears: two or three get pressed many times a day, four or five get pressed only when their state is in question, and the rest never get pressed at all. The last group should be turned off in each app's own preferences. The first group stays visible. The middle group is what crowds the bar, and it is the group collapsing was designed for.

One detail decides whether collapsing works in practice: whether a collapsed item can be pressed without expanding the whole row first. If reaching it means expanding everything and scanning, the search that motivated the cleanup has simply moved one step later. If the collapsed item can be pressed in place and its menu opens there, the entire middle group can go away safely.

Sorting the row, in order

Write down every icon currently in the row, left to right. Mark which ones were clicked in the last seven days.

For the unmarked ones, open each app's own preferences and look for an option to stop showing a menu bar item. Many apps have one, and this step alone usually removes two or three without any tool involved.

Sort what remains into three piles: always visible, collapsed, removed. Always visible is for things looked at without being clicked, such as a clock or an input source indicator. Collapsed is for things clicked sometimes. Removed is for things neither watched nor clicked. A charge limiter lands in the first or second pile depending on how often the limit changes and whether its state gets checked.

Resist the urge to make the piles precise on the first pass. Two piles are enough to start with, visible and not visible, and the third can be split out later once it is clear which items keep getting looked for. Rules that show an item only during certain hours or only when a particular app is in front are useful, but they are worth adding after the basic sort has settled, because a rule written around an item that turns out to belong in a different pile has to be rewritten anyway.

Then work for a day and promote anything that had to be hunted for. Set conditions and shortcuts afterwards, once the piles have stopped moving. On a MacBook with a notch, this matters more than aesthetics: items that reach the notch are not drawn at all, so the sort decides what is visible rather than just what is tidy.

Hiding backfires on exceptional days, not ordinary ones

Removing the icon feels costless for weeks, because the days it matters are rare and predictable. Four of them are worth naming in advance.

The evening before travel, when the limit gets raised to 100 percent temporarily and lowered again afterwards. Before a long meeting or a day on site, when the question is whether the battery reached the target yet. When the battery starts behaving oddly and a manual discharge or calibration cycle is the response. And the week after a macOS update, when watching whether the limit still holds is worth doing daily, since the vendor documents that updates occasionally break enforcement on some machines.

Each of these happens perhaps monthly. That is exactly why the cost shows up late: nothing goes wrong immediately, and then one evening the app cannot be found. Anyone choosing to hide the icon should pick the replacement path first and pick one that will still be remembered in six weeks, which usually means a Shortcut with a key combination or the Dock icon rather than a folder somewhere.

If none of those four situations sound familiar, hiding is safe. The decision is about how the machine is used, not about whether the icon is well designed.

Comparing the three choices directly

Choice	State visible	Reachable	Menu bar width used
Leave it visible	Yes, at a glance	One click	One slot
Collapse it	After expanding	One click, in place	None
Hide it	No	Needs another entry point	None

Check the limit several times a day and the first row applies. Touch it a few times a year and the third row is fine. Everything in between belongs in the second row, which is also the reversible option: a collapsed item can be promoted back to always visible in a second, while a hidden one requires finding the setting again.

What to look at if collapsing

Two questions decide whether a given organizer solves the problem: can a collapsed item be clicked without expanding the row, and can items be split between always hidden and conditionally shown. The features page covers how a hidden item gets opened and what happens to clicks while the bar is collapsed. Permissions are the other practical hurdle, since rearranging or hiding items requires grants from macOS that need renewing after some updates, and the FAQ covers what gets asked for and when.

What to change first

Decide what the icon's four states are worth in daily use. If the answer is nothing, set up one replacement path and turn it off in the Appearance tab. If the answer is something, leave it alone and thin the row around it instead, which is what a menu bar organizer does without taking anything away.