Alfred menu bar icon: hide it or keep it

The bowler hat sits somewhere in the top right of the screen, between a sync client and a battery utility. It has probably not been clicked in months, because the launcher gets summoned from the keyboard. So the question is whether that slot is doing any work at all.

The answer depends on something that has nothing to do with the launcher itself: whether the hotkey is reliably in muscle memory. Everything else follows from that.

Two kinds of menu bar icon

Resident apps put one of two things in the menu bar, and the distinction decides how much hiding costs.

The first kind is a display. The glyph itself carries information, so it earns its slot without ever being clicked. A battery limiter that changes shape when charging stops, a recorder that turns red while capturing, a sync client that animates during a transfer. Hide one of these and the information is gone, not just the button.

The second kind is a door. The glyph never changes and carries no state. Clicking it opens a small menu, which leads somewhere else: preferences, an update check, quit. The launcher hat is firmly in this category. Its normal invocation is a keystroke, set by default to Option and Space, and documented as the first item in the app's General preferences.

By default, the default hotkey to show Alfred's search box is ⌥ Space , but you can change this to another key combination you find more memorable. Source: alfredapp.com

That single sentence sets the terms of the decision. Hiding a display costs information. Hiding a door costs a route, and a route only matters if the alternative routes are known. So the honest version of the question is not "is this icon useful" but "are the other ways in actually available right now".

Where the setting lives

The app can remove its own item from the menu bar. The control is in Appearance, behind an Options button in the bottom left, and it is phrased as a hide checkbox. The official documentation states it in reverse, as the way back:

If you'd like to make the bowler hat visible again in your menu bar, go to Alfred's Appearance tab in the preferences, click "Options" (in the bottom left) and uncheck "Hide menu bar icon". Source: alfredapp.com

The fact that this exists as a standalone troubleshooting page is the interesting part. It is filed under a title about having hidden the item and no longer being able to find the app. Vendors write pages like that in response to support volume, which means enough people hide the hat, forget the hotkey, and get stuck that it warranted its own URL.

Three ways back in after hiding it

Removing the icon does not stop the app. Launching at login is a separate checkbox in General preferences and is unaffected by the appearance setting. After hiding, these routes remain:

The hotkey. Option and Space by default, or whatever replaced it. This is the daily route and the only one that should ever be needed.

The application itself. Double-clicking the app in the Applications folder brings up the search window. This is the recovery route when the key combination has been forgotten.

Command and comma. With the search window open, the standard macOS preferences shortcut opens the preferences panel, from which the appearance setting can be reversed. Typing "preferences" into the search window also surfaces a result that opens the same panel.

Testing at least two of these before flipping the setting takes under a minute and removes the entire failure mode. It is worth doing even for people who are confident, because confidence about a key combination and the ability to recall it eight months later are different things.

What only the hat does

Calling it a pure door is slightly too neat. Three pieces of official guidance route through it.

Version checking is one. The permissions documentation tells the reader to click the bowler hat in the menu bar to see which version is running. The Update tab in preferences shows the same thing, but the hat is the path the vendor names first.

Quitting is another. The uninstall instructions start by clicking the hat and choosing Quit, then dragging the old version from the Applications folder to the Trash. That page also carries a warning worth knowing separately: it advises against app cleaners, on the grounds that they can be overzealous and remove files the current version still needs.

The third is the forgetting case already described. A hat that stays visible is a permanent, zero-effort answer to a question that only comes up once every couple of years, which is exactly when nobody remembers the answer.

None of these is a daily need, and that is the point. They are all rare-but-blocking situations, which is a different category from convenience. A door used once a month can be closed without much thought. A door used once every two years, at the exact moment something has gone wrong, deserves a plan rather than a shrug. The plan does not have to be keeping the icon visible. It can be a note, or a second known route, or an organizer that keeps the item reachable. It just has to exist before the setting gets flipped.

It is also worth separating this app from the rest of the row on one specific ground. Most resident utilities are used through their menu bar item and nowhere else, so hiding them genuinely changes how they are operated. A keyboard launcher is the opposite: it is likely one of the most used pieces of software on the machine, and its menu bar item is likely one of the least used. That mismatch is what makes it an unusually clean candidate for hiding, and also what makes people overconfident about hiding it.

Settle the hotkey before touching the icon

Every argument above reduces to one prerequisite. The hat is safe to hide once the keyboard route is dependable, and unsafe to hide before that. Three things make it dependable.

Decide whether to keep the default. Option and Space ships as the default specifically because it does not collide with the system search shortcut. Plenty of people move it to Command and Space because that is where their fingers already go, and that change requires disabling or reassigning the macOS shortcut first. The vendor maintains a dedicated page for that one change, which is a reasonable signal of how often it goes wrong. A hotkey that half works is worse than no hotkey, because the failure looks like the app being broken.

Make every Mac agree. A work machine and a home machine with different key combinations will never produce reliable muscle memory, because each one keeps overwriting the other. Preferences syncing exists for this: settings can be kept in a shared folder so both machines read the same configuration, which also doubles as an off-machine backup of the setup. Sync first, then hide, on both machines.

Write the combination down somewhere outside the Mac. This sounds trivial and is the step most often skipped. The problem after hiding the icon is never that the key cannot be pressed. It is that it cannot be recalled, months later, on a machine where nothing on screen offers a hint.

When all three are true, hiding the hat carries close to no risk. When any one of them is still unsettled, the icon is doing quiet insurance work and the slot is cheap by comparison. That is the whole decision, and it can be re-made at any time in a few seconds.

Removing and collapsing are different operations

There are two ways to stop seeing an icon, and they are not interchangeable.

Removing means the app stops drawing an item at all. The row gets one slot back. Reversing it means going back into that specific app's preferences and finding that specific checkbox.

Collapsing means the item still exists in the menu bar, but is folded out of sight and expanded on demand. This is what a menu bar organizer for macOS does. Some of them go further, letting a hidden item be clicked and its menu opened while the bar stays folded, so nothing has to be expanded first.

	Remove in the app	Collapse behind an organizer
Item exists in the menu bar	No	Yes, folded away
Slot freed in the visible row	Yes	Yes
How to reach it afterwards	Hotkey or Applications folder	Expand, or click it while folded
How to reverse	That app's Appearance options	One place, same for every app
Ordering across apps	Not applicable	Set in one list

The practical difference shows up at the twelfth app, not the first. Removing works fine once. Removing across a dozen resident utilities means a dozen different preference panes, a dozen different labels for the same idea, and no single place that answers what is currently hidden. A comparison of the two approaches sits on the How it compares page, and the specific behaviours an organizer adds are listed under Features.

An order of operations for the whole row

Going icon by icon is slow. A fixed order gets through it faster.

Start with what macOS can remove without any third party involvement. Control Center settings allow individual system items such as Bluetooth, Sound and Focus to be hidden outright. Whatever disappears here costs nothing and needs no new software.

Then sort what remains into displays and doors, using the test from earlier: does the glyph change on its own. Displays stay. Doors become candidates.

Then rank the doors by how often they are actually clicked, not how important the app feels. An app can be essential and still have a menu bar item that has never once been used, which is the normal situation for a keyboard launcher.

Finally, treat the newest installs as exceptions. An app installed last week has no muscle memory attached to it yet, and its icon is doing real work as a reminder. Revisit it in a month rather than hiding it on day one.

One more thing is worth building into the process: assume the answer will change. The set of resident apps turns over constantly, and the amount of visible space is not fixed either, since connecting an external display changes how much of the row is usable and a notch on the built in display eats into it. A decision made once, in a single sitting, will be wrong within a year. A decision that can be revised in one list, in a few seconds, will not be. That difference is the practical case for handling the whole row in one place rather than app by app, and it applies regardless of which app started the question.

What to change first

Leave the launcher's own appearance setting alone for now and collapse the whole row instead. If the hat still feels like clutter after a week of that, the checkbox in Appearance is still there and takes seconds. Doing it in that order means nothing has to be undone. Koffret is one way to try the collapsing side before touching any per-app setting.