Bartender 5: what changed and what to check first

The menu bar filled up again. Cloud storage, a password manager, two chat apps, a backup agent, something that came with the printer driver, and the one icon that is actually needed right now is somewhere in the middle. A tool was installed to fix that, the tool moved to a new major version, and the obvious question is what changed and whether anything needs to be done about it.

Release notes answer that question in the vocabulary of the people who wrote the software. This article answers it in the vocabulary of the person whose menu bar is full. Four things change when a menu bar manager for macOS goes up a major version, and only one of them appears in a feature list.

A version bump changes four things you can feel

Most of what appears in release notes is invisible in daily use. The parts that reach the person using the Mac are narrower:

What changes	Where you find out
The minimum macOS version supported	The vendor's download or requirements page, before you install
How it is paid for, including whether a major version costs again	The pricing page, before you install
Which macOS permissions must be granted again	System Settings, right after you install
Which of your existing settings carry over	The first launch, when your menu bar either looks right or does not

The first two are answerable in five minutes of reading. The second two are only answerable after the new version is running. That order matters, because the second two are the ones that produce the feeling that something broke.

Feature lists sit outside this table on purpose. The core behavior of this category, collapsing the right side of the menu bar and giving you a way to reach what got collapsed, does not change much between versions. What changes at the edges is how granular the rules can be, how the settings window is arranged, and how much of the appearance can be adjusted. Those are worth reading about after the four practical items are settled.

The macOS floor moves first

A new major version of a menu bar tool usually raises the oldest version of macOS it will run on. That single line in the requirements creates the first fork in the road: update macOS and take the new version of the tool, or stay where you are and keep the older version of the tool.

Updating macOS is never only about the menu bar. Audio interfaces, printers, VPN clients, and the specific version of a design or development tool that a project depends on all have their own compatibility stories. Raising the whole operating system to tidy a row of icons is the wrong trade if it stalls the work the Mac is for. Check the software you are paid to use before you check the software that arranges icons.

Staying on the older version has its own question: how long the old build stays downloadable and how long it keeps getting fixes. Some vendors keep legacy installers posted, some do not. If a Mac gets wiped or replaced, being able to reinstall the version you settled on is the difference between an afternoon and a problem. Keep the installer you are running, not just the license.

There is also a hardware dimension. Requirements pages sometimes list a macOS version and separately list which Macs that version supports. Apple publishes which machines each release covers on the macOS pages, and on an older Intel Mac that list decides the question before any menu bar tool does.

Permissions get asked again

To rearrange or hide items in the menu bar, this kind of tool needs permission from macOS. Accessibility is the common one. Depending on how the tool is built, screen recording permission is also used, because reading what is currently displayed in the menu bar means reading part of the screen.

Recent versions of macOS treat these grants as something to re-confirm rather than something granted once forever. When an app's contents are replaced by a new major version, or when macOS itself is updated, the grant can end up in a state where the app appears in the list but no longer functions with it.

The symptom is specific and easy to misread. The app launches, its settings look correct, and the menu bar simply does not collapse. That reads as a bug in the new version. More often it is the permission. Open System Settings, go to Privacy & Security, and look at both the Accessibility and Screen Recording lists. If the app is present and checked and still nothing happens, remove it from the list and add it back, then quit and relaunch. Apple documents where these controls live in its support pages.

Check permissions before you conclude the new version is broken. It costs a minute and it explains most of the reports that begin with "it worked yesterday".

What carries over, and what does not

The settings behind a tidy menu bar are not one kind of thing. They are four kinds, and they migrate very differently:

• The classification itself: which items are always shown, which are hidden behind the collapse, and which are hidden all the time
• Keyboard shortcuts assigned to collapsing, expanding, or searching
• Conditional rules that show or hide something based on battery level, time of day, or which app is in front
• Appearance settings such as spacing between icons and where the separators sit

Within one product line, a major version usually carries all four across. Between different products, only the first one travels reliably, because every tool in this category has some notion of shown, hidden, and always hidden. Shortcuts, conditions, and spacing are implemented differently everywhere, so they are usually re-entered by hand.

That difference is worth planning around rather than discovering. If a switch is being considered, read the vendor's own description of what an import covers, assume the shortcuts and the conditional rules will be rebuilt, and set aside fifteen minutes for it. Most reports that a migration lost someone's settings are really a mismatch between what someone expected to move and what the import was ever documented to move.

There is a second detail that catches people. Imports in this category generally work per application, identified by the app's bundle identifier, not per individual icon. An app that puts two separate items in the menu bar will usually have both of them land in the same group, because the import has no way to tell them apart. If one of those two items belongs in the always visible group and the other does not, that is a manual correction after the import, not a failure of it.

The same is true of profiles. If several different menu bar layouts have been saved and are switched between during the day, an import typically reads whichever one is currently active. The others are not lost from the original tool, but they do not arrive in the new one. Anyone relying on multiple layouts should expect to rebuild the ones that were not active at the moment of import.

The part no version bump does for you

None of the above decides what belongs in your menu bar. That decision survives every upgrade and every switch, and skipping it is why a menu bar refills within a month of being cleaned.

Sort what is currently in the bar into three groups.

Always visible. Items whose value is in being glanceable: battery, the Wi-Fi network you are on, the clock, an indicator that a meeting is live. You do not click these. You read them.

Visible on demand. Items you press occasionally and never read passively: cloud storage, password manager, screenshot tools, clipboard history. This group is what a menu bar manager is for. If hidden items can be pressed with the bar still collapsed, so their menus open in place, this group costs nothing to hide.

Not needed at all. Items that have been sitting there since installation and have not been clicked this quarter. Most of these have a preference inside their own app to stop appearing in the menu bar, and turning that off is better than hiding it, because it removes the item rather than storing it.

A useful sorting rule: if you have neither read nor clicked an item in the past week, it goes in the third group.

A working order for the cleanup

Write down everything currently in the bar. The list is almost always longer than the estimate.

Turn off the third group at the source, in each app's own preferences. Then reduce the system items with what macOS already provides: Control Center settings let you choose individually whether Bluetooth, Sound, Focus and similar controls appear in the menu bar, and the clock format and Spotlight icon are adjustable in settings too. Every item removed here is one fewer item for any tool to manage.

Only then set up the tool, and set it up coarsely: two buckets, always visible and hidden, with no conditions and no shortcuts yet. Work for a day. Anything you found yourself hunting for gets promoted back to always visible. Add conditional rules and shortcuts after the boundary has stopped moving, because rules built on an unstable boundary get rebuilt anyway.

Where to check before you switch

If the version change is prompting a look at alternatives, the useful reading is narrow and it is all published by vendors. Three pages answer most of it.

What a tool can actually do, including how items are reached once they are hidden, belongs on a features page rather than in a marketing summary. Whether the collapse is one click, a shortcut, or a hover changes how it feels far more than the length of the feature list does.

Cost structure is the item people check last and should check first, because it is the one that differs most across this category: one-time purchase, subscription, free and open source, or a paid upgrade at each major version. A pricing page states which of those applies and what a major version does to it.

Import scope, permission requirements, and supported macOS versions tend to collect on an FAQ page, and that is where the questions that surface on day one are usually already answered.

One caution on comparisons, including this one: the facts in this category move. Prices, supported macOS versions, and which features exist were checked in September 2026 against publicly published vendor material, and any of them can change with the next release. Read the vendor's current page before deciding, not a comparison table written at some earlier date.

What to change first

Before evaluating anything new, spend ten minutes turning off the icons you have not clicked in a week, using each app's own settings. That alone removes most of the crowding, and it makes any tool you try afterwards easier to judge on its merits. When you do try one, check the macOS requirement and the pricing model before installing and the permissions immediately after, then start with two buckets and refine from there. If you want to see how one tool in this category handles the collapse and the import, Koffret documents both.