Dozer on Mac: how to set it up

The app is installed, two or three small black dots have appeared near the right edge of the menu bar, and clicking them does nothing useful. That is the normal starting state, and it is not a fault. This class of tool does not read the menu bar and decide what matters. It plants a boundary marker and hides whatever sits to the left of it. Until the icons have been dragged into position around that marker, clicking has nothing to act on.

Everything below follows from that one idea. The setup work is arranging icons around a wall, and the preferences pane mostly controls when the wall closes on its own.

What to check before installing

The project README lists two install routes: a one line package manager command, and a manual download of a disk image. As of 10 September 2026 only the second one works. The package manager index no longer carries an entry for this app, and querying a local install returns no match, so the published command fails even when typed correctly. The README and the current index disagree, which is worth knowing before assuming a typo.

The second thing to check is the binary itself. The most recent release is 4.2.0, published on 13 July 2020, and it ships as an Intel only executable. On an Apple silicon Mac it runs through the macOS translation layer. Apple states the timeline for that layer plainly in the developer documentation:

Rosetta was designed to make the transition to Apple silicon easier, and will be available through macOS 27 as a general-purpose tool for Intel apps to help developers complete the migration of their apps.

Source: developer.apple.com

That does not block installation today. It does mean a resident utility built this way is a shorter term arrangement than it looks. To confirm what any app is built for, select it in the Finder, open the info window, and read the Kind field. Apple documents the three possible values on the Apple support site.

The dots are boundaries, not buttons

Counting from the right edge inward, the dots have separate jobs:

• The first is only a place to click. Its position carries no meaning, so it can sit anywhere.
• The second is the wall. Everything to its left disappears when any dot is clicked, and comes back on the next click.
• The third is optional and creates a second wall. Everything to its left only reappears on option click.

The important word is wall. Nothing is analysed at click time. An icon left of the second dot is hidden; an icon right of it stays. This is why the app appears inert on first launch: the wall exists, but nothing has been moved behind it yet.

The third dot is off by default. Turning it on splits hidden items into two tiers, which is useful when some icons should be one click away and others belong out of sight for weeks. Two tiers also mean more dragging to maintain. Starting with a single wall and adding the second one later, only if the single tier proves too coarse, keeps the setup work proportional.

Rearranging icons is a macOS gesture, not an app feature

Hold command and drag a menu bar icon to move it. This is built into macOS, which is why the README calls it out as a note rather than a feature.

The arrangement rules follow directly from the wall:

• Icons that should always be visible go to the right of the second dot.
• Icons that should normally be collapsed go to its left.
• Icons that should only appear on option click go to the left of the third dot.

Two things trip people up here. The first is that not every icon can move. Items drawn by macOS itself, such as the clock and Control Center, do not respond to the command drag. Only icons placed there by installed apps can be repositioned, so the system items act as fixed points to arrange around.

The second is that the dots are draggable too. Moving a dot instead of an icon silently changes which group gets hidden, and the result looks like the app misbehaving. When the arrangement stops making sense, expand everything and read the row from the right edge inward before touching anything else.

With more than about ten icons, doing this in one pass gets tedious. Collecting the always visible items at the far right first, then sweeping the remainder left past the wall, cuts down the back and forth.

The preferences, and what each one costs

Right click any dot to open preferences. The labels are terse, so here is what they control:

Setting	Effect	Default
Launch at login	Starts the app with the session	Off
Hide menu bar icons at launch	Starts collapsed rather than expanded	Off
Hide menu bar icons after	Auto collapses after a delay of 3, 5, 10, 15, 20 or 30 seconds	Off, 10 seconds
Enable 'remove' Dozer icon	Adds the second wall for option click	Off
Hide both Dozer icons when menu bar icons are hidden	Removes the dots themselves while collapsed	Off
Use full width of screen when showing menu bar icons	Expands across the display width	Off
Font size of Dozer icons	Dot size, 4 px through 40 px	10 px
Width of Dozer icons	Horizontal padding around each dot	25 px
Show/hide menu bar icons	Registers a global keyboard shortcut	Unset

The auto collapse delay carries a note in the pane stating that the timer resets on interaction with the menu bar. In practice that makes short delays livable, because the bar does not fold away mid task.

Two of these matter more than the rest on day one. Without launch at login, the app is absent after every restart. Without hide at launch, every session begins fully expanded and has to be collapsed by hand, which removes most of the point.

Dot size and width look cosmetic and are not. At 10 px the dots are discreet and easy to miss when aiming. Widening the padding costs horizontal space but makes the target reliable, which matters more the more often the dots get clicked. On a crowded menu bar the temptation runs the other way, shrinking the dots to reclaim space, and that trade tends to be regretted within a week.

The full width option only becomes relevant once a lot of icons are hidden. Expanding reveals the hidden group by pushing the visible items further left, and if the combined row is wider than the display, the leftmost entries simply are not drawn. Turning the option on buys back some of that room. When items still fall off the end afterwards, the real answer is fewer resident icons rather than another display setting.

One dependency between settings is worth knowing in advance. The option that hides both dots stays unavailable until a keyboard shortcut has been registered, and it becomes available the moment one is set. That ordering is deliberate: without a shortcut there would be no way back to an expanded bar. So the sequence is register the shortcut, confirm it works, then hide the dots, in that order.

Choosing the shortcut takes a moment of thought. Combinations built on control and option with a letter tend to be free, while anything using command alone is likely already claimed by the frontmost app. A shortcut that silently fails is usually a collision rather than a registration problem, and trying a second combination settles the question quickly.

Removing the dots entirely

One preference hides the dots themselves while the bar is collapsed. The result is the quietest possible menu bar, with nothing left but the icons that earned a permanent slot. It also removes the thing that gets clicked, so a keyboard shortcut has to be registered first.

This suits a setup where hidden icons are genuinely not consulted. It does not suit one where the hidden group carries live state worth glancing at, because a collapsed bar with no dots gives no way to peek without a keystroke.

The deciding factor is how often hidden icons need to be opened rather than merely seen. Some menu bar managers require expanding the bar before a hidden icon can be clicked, so every interaction costs two steps. Others let a hidden icon be clicked and its menu opened while the bar stays collapsed, which makes a high interaction rate survivable. The comparison page sets out how the available tools differ on exactly this point, and the features page covers what collapsing does and does not change.

Notched Macs change where the wall should sit

On a MacBook with a display notch, menu bar items fill from the right edge toward the middle and stop being drawn when they reach the notch. Anything past that point is not merely hard to see, it is not rendered and cannot be clicked.

If the dots get pushed that far left, the collapse gesture becomes unavailable, which reads as the app failing. The fix is positional: keep the first two dots well to the right of the notch and push everything else leftward instead. Expanding may still overrun the notch temporarily, but as long as the dots are reachable while collapsed, the setup remains usable.

An external display changes the calculation again, since the menu bar lives on the primary display. Working with the lid closed removes the notch problem entirely. Alternating between open and closed is the awkward case, and it is worth choosing dot positions that work in both states rather than re-dragging by situation.

Confirming the arrangement works

Three checks, in order, will surface almost any setup mistake:

1. Click a dot. Only icons left of the wall should vanish, and everything right of it should remain.
2. Option click a dot. With the third wall enabled, items left of it should now appear as well.
3. Press the registered shortcut. It should produce the same result as clicking.

Nothing happening on the first check means the icons are still on the visible side of the wall. No difference on the second means the third dot is disabled or has nothing behind it. No response on the third usually means the shortcut collides with another app, and a different combination will register cleanly.

Run these immediately after arranging, while the intended layout is still fresh. Coming back a week later means reconstructing the plan before testing it.

What to change first

Set launch at login and hide at launch, then drag exactly one icon behind the wall and click a dot to confirm the mechanism responds. Everything else is tuning that can wait. If the collapse works but hidden icons turn out to need clicking several times a day, the constraint is the two step expand, and that is a question of tool design rather than configuration: the Koffret download page and the pricing page describe an approach that keeps hidden icons clickable without expanding first.