Maccy menu bar icon: hide it or keep it

A clipboard manager is opened dozens of times a day and almost never by clicking its icon. The keyboard shortcut does the work. So the icon sits in the menu bar taking up a slot it rarely earns, next to a dozen others in the same position, and the obvious move is to switch it off.

There is a setting for exactly that, and it takes one click. The reason to read further is that three things are attached to that icon, two of them are not available anywhere else, and one of them matters when handling credentials.

What the setting is, and where it lives

The Appearance section of Preferences has a Show menu icon toggle. Switch it off and the app keeps running, keeps recording, keeps answering its keyboard shortcut, and shows nothing in the menu bar. Preferences also lets the icon itself be changed through a picker next to that toggle, for anyone whose objection is the look of it rather than the slot it occupies.

Next to it is a separate toggle, Show recent copy next to menu icon, which puts the most recent clipboard entry as text in the menu bar. That one is worth knowing about in the other direction: if the menu bar suddenly has a long string of text in it, this is the setting responsible, and it is the single largest consumer of menu bar width the app can be configured into.

One practical warning before switching the icon off. Preferences is reachable with ⌘, from the app window, and the settings pane says so, but the app window itself is normally opened with the keyboard shortcut. Know the shortcut before removing the icon. The default is ⇧⌘C. If the footer inside the window has also been hidden, the route in from the window is gone too, and one line in Terminal brings it back:

defaults write org.p0deje.Maccy showFooter 1

Three things the icon does that the keyboard does not

This is the part that decides the question, so it is worth being specific.

Holding ⌥ and clicking the icon stops new copies from being recorded. That is the switch used before copying a password, an API key, or a client's bank details out of a password manager. Holding ⌥⇧ and clicking skips only the next copy, which is the version most people actually want: one copy passes through unrecorded and normal behavior resumes by itself. Neither has a keyboard equivalent. The state can be set from Terminal instead:

defaults write org.p0deje.Maccy ignoreEvents true

That works, but it is a command to remember and a second command to undo, at the exact moment when attention is elsewhere. In practice, people who hide the icon stop using the feature.

Clicking the icon opens the window. Redundant with the shortcut, until the shortcut conflicts with something. The project's FAQ documents the case where macOS already owns the combination, for instance the shortcut that converts text to simplified Chinese under Services, then Text, and the fix involves clearing the system assignment and relaunching the app. During that stretch, the icon is the only way in.

The icon can be the anchor for where the window appears. Appearance offers a Popup at picker with options for the cursor, the menu icon, the window center, the screen center, and the last position. Choosing the menu icon and then hiding the icon removes the reference point that option is built on.

None of this makes hiding the icon wrong. It makes it a trade, and the trade is worth naming before making it rather than discovering it three weeks later with a password on the clipboard.

The window can absorb some of the icon's job

If the icon is going away, the window it opens has to carry more weight, and the Appearance pane has several settings that decide how much it carries. Going through them before flipping the toggle is what makes the change stick.

Show search field controls whether the search box is always present or appears only once typing starts, through a visibility picker next to it. Always on is the safer choice when the icon is gone, because the window then looks the same every time it is summoned and there is no moment of wondering whether the app has focus.

Show application icons puts the source application next to each entry. With a long history and no menu bar presence, that column is the fastest way to find the snippet copied out of a terminal rather than the one copied out of a browser. Show special symbols exposes newlines, tabs, and leading or trailing spaces, which matters when the thing being pasted is code or a value that must not carry a stray space.

Highlight matches sets how search hits are marked, with color, bold, italic, and underline available and bold as the default. Show hex color swatch draws the color next to a hex code. Image height caps how tall image previews are, defaulting to 40, and the tooltip in the pane notes that setting it to 16 makes images line up with text entries, which is useful for a dense list.

Open Preview automatically and the Preview delay slider, defaulting to 1500 ms, control the detail popup. Turning the automatic preview on and shortening the delay compensates for one thing the icon used to provide, which is a sense that the app is present and responding.

And Show footer is the one to leave alone. The footer is the visible route into Preferences, and it is the thing that makes hiding the menu bar icon a reversible decision without opening Terminal.

Why the menu bar runs out of room in the first place

Menu bar space is not unlimited and it is not negotiable. The width available is the screen width minus the app menus on the left, and on recent laptops minus the notch in the middle. When resident apps outnumber the slots, macOS stops drawing items, starting from the right.

That produces a symptom worth recognizing: an icon that was never hidden and is not visible. Nothing is broken and no setting was touched. The slot ran out. The test takes seconds, which is to quit two or three other resident apps and watch whether the missing icon reappears.

There is a second effect on notched laptops that catches people out. The notch splits the usable width into two regions, and an item that would have been drawn under it is pushed aside instead. The result is that the bar can appear to have empty space on the left while still refusing to draw a new item on the right. Counting visible icons and comparing that to the number of resident apps is the only reliable way to tell how close the bar is to full.

It also explains why switching off one icon feels like a fix and is not. Removing a clipboard manager from the bar buys back one slot out of fifteen, and the next app installed takes it. The underlying number, how many resident apps are running, has not changed.

The case for keeping it visible

For a smaller group, the icon is the point. Three situations:

Anyone who regularly copies credentials uses the ⌥ click often enough that it belongs within reach. That is the strongest argument on this side of the question.

Anyone still learning the app benefits from having the entry point visible. The keyboard-first design assumes the shortcuts are known. Search accepts typed text and ⏎ copies the highlighted item, ⌥⏎ pastes it, ⌥⇧⏎ pastes it without formatting, ⌥P pins, and ⌥⌫ deletes. That is a real amount to absorb, and the icon covers the gap in the meantime.

Anyone whose recording state changes several times a day, because sensitive material passes through the machine in bursts, needs a state indicator. A keyboard shortcut has no way to show whether recording is currently on.

One more argument belongs on this side, and it is about other people. On a shared or managed Mac, an app with no visible presence is an app nobody else can find. Whoever sits down next has no way to see that clipboard history is being recorded, or to stop it. Where that matters, visibility is not clutter, it is disclosure.

The option that is neither hiding nor keeping

The framing of this question is usually binary: leave the icon in the bar, or switch it off in Preferences. There is a third arrangement, which is to leave the icon enabled and collapse the menu bar so it is out of sight until called for.

The distinction that matters is whether a hidden icon is still clickable. Tools in this category differ on exactly that point. Some hide icons behind a divider and require the bar to be expanded first, which means the ⌥ click on a hidden icon takes two steps instead of one. A tool that lets a hidden icon be clicked while the bar stays collapsed, opening its menu in place, keeps the credential workflow intact at one action, which is the whole reason the icon was kept.

That arrangement separates two decisions that the binary framing fuses together. How much menu bar width the clipboard manager occupies becomes a question about the bar. Whether the ⌥ click is available stays a question about the app. Changing one no longer costs the other.

Arrangement	Menu bar width used	⌥ click to stop recording
Icon visible	One slot, always	One action
Show menu icon off	None	Terminal command only
Icon collapsed, still clickable	None while collapsed	One action

Order of operations, whichever way this goes

Before changing the toggle, confirm the keyboard shortcut and leave the footer visible. Those two make the setting reversible without Terminal.

Then check how often the ⌥ click is actually used over a normal week. Frequently means the icon should stay reachable, and the question becomes a menu bar question rather than an app question. Never means the toggle is a clean win and the answer is the Appearance pane.

There is a middle test worth running for anyone genuinely undecided. Switch off Show recent copy next to menu icon if it is on, leave the icon itself alone, and live with that for a few days. It reclaims most of the width the app was using without removing any action, and for a fair number of people the complaint turns out to have been the text string rather than the icon.

Either way, count the resident apps. Anyone whose menu bar is dropping items from the right has more than an icon's worth of a problem, and removing the clipboard manager from the bar will not settle it.

What to change first

Leave Show menu icon on for a week and note every time the ⌥ click gets used. If the count is above zero, keep the icon and collapse the bar instead, which is what a menu bar manager such as Koffret does while leaving hidden icons clickable. If the count is zero, switch the toggle off and learn ⌘, for the way back in. The comparison and FAQ pages cover how hidden icons behave while the bar stays collapsed.