Vanilla is installed but the menu bar looks unchanged. What now?

Check that Screen Recording permission is granted, which lives under System Settings, Privacy and Security on macOS 13 and later. Then check whether the configuration dot is visible in the menu bar at all. On a notched MacBook with many menu bar items, the dot itself can be among the icons macOS drops, which requires the make-space-first setup sequence.

Why does an icon-hiding app need Screen Recording permission?

It captures the top 50 pixels of the screen to blend the collapsed portion of the menu bar into the background so the join is not visible. The published documentation states these captures are neither stored nor transmitted, and that the app connects to the internet only for update checks and license validation.

The continue button on the permission screen does nothing. How is that fixed?

Quit the app, then remove its entry from both the Accessibility list and the Screen Recording list in system settings and add it back manually from the Applications folder. Stale permission records pointing at an old location are the usual cause, which is why removing and re-adding both entries resolves it.

Why does the divider keep moving on its own?

The menu bar clock defaults to showing the date only when space allows, which changes the clock's width as the date appears and disappears. Setting the date to always show or never show gives the clock a fixed width and stops the divider from drifting.

Vanilla on Mac: how to set it up

Vanilla is installed, the app is running, and the menu bar looks exactly the same as before. Or the setup screen is asking for a permission that sounds far more invasive than hiding icons. Both are normal points to stop at, and both have documented answers.

This walks through the setup in the order it actually happens: the divider, the permission, the fix when the permission screen refuses to advance, and the two hardware and system conditions that change the steps.

The configuration is a divider, not a settings panel

Almost every setting in this app is made by dragging something in the menu bar rather than by ticking a box. After launch, a small dot appears in the menu bar. Everything to the right of that dot is the collapsible group. Everything to the left stays permanently visible.

There are two gestures. Clicking the dot collapses the group or expands it again. Dragging the dot left or right changes which icons belong to the group. Moving an icon out of the group means dragging the icon itself, or dragging the dot past it, using the same command-drag gesture macOS uses for rearranging menu bar items.

The number of dots depends on one option. With the option for completely removing icons switched off, there is one dot. With it switched on, there are two, and the menu bar is divided into three zones: always visible, collapsible, and removed. Icons in the removed zone are visible only while the preferences window is open.

That third zone is a one-way door for daily use. Reaching an icon parked there means opening preferences first, so it suits background utilities touched once a quarter and does not suit anything needed weekly.

The Screen Recording permission and what it is for

The setup asks for macOS Screen Recording permission, which reliably raises an eyebrow for an app whose job is to hide icons. The published explanation is specific: the app captures the top 50 pixels of the screen so that the collapsed portion of the menu bar can be blended with the background and the join stays invisible. The developer states that these captures are not stored and not transmitted, and that network access happens only for update checks and license validation.

Granting it follows the standard macOS flow. Approve the prompt, open the system settings pane it offers, tick the entry, quit the app when prompted, and launch it again. On macOS 13 and later the pane lives under System Settings, Privacy and Security, Screen Recording. The published guides still describe the older System Preferences layout with Security and Privacy, so the wording differs from what is on screen today while the destination is the same.

The app also uses Accessibility permission. Troubleshooting steps treat the two together, so a half-granted state, where one is ticked and the other is not, produces behaviour that looks like a bug.

When the permission screen will not advance

A stuck setup screen, where the button to continue does nothing, has its own entry in the published help. The documented fix is to remove both permissions and add them back by hand.

Update to the current version first, using the update check in the dot's menu.
Quit the app, from the dot's menu, the Dock icon, or Activity Monitor.
Open the Accessibility list in system settings and unlock it for editing.
Select the app's entry and remove it with the minus button.
Add it back with the plus button, choosing the app from the Applications folder.
Repeat both steps in the Screen Recording list.
Launch the app again.

The reason this works is usually stale bookkeeping. A permission record can point at a copy of the app in a location it no longer occupies, which happens when an app is launched once from the Downloads folder and moved to Applications afterwards. Moving the app to Applications before granting permissions prevents the same problem from returning.

There is also a system-level prompt that is not a fault. Since macOS 15, apps holding Screen Recording permission are asked to re-confirm it periodically, on a monthly cycle after Apple changed an earlier weekly interval before release. That prompt reappears indefinitely and is unrelated to setup being incomplete.

A notched MacBook changes the order of the steps

On MacBooks with a notch, the usable menu bar width is the space to the right of it, and macOS silently drops any items that overflow. The dropped items are not visible, not clickable, and give no indication that they exist. When the configuration dots are among the dropped items, setup becomes impossible in the obvious order because the thing being configured cannot be seen.

The published procedure reverses the sequence: make space first, configure second.

Quit the app if it is running.
Temporarily quit other menu bar apps, or remove menu bar items, until everything fits to the right of the notch.
Open the app and its preferences window.
Confirm one dot is visible, or two if the remove option is switched on.
Command-drag the dot or dots to the right end of the available space.
Restart the other apps and restore the removed items, which will appear to the left of the dots.
Drag the dots to set the zone boundaries as normal.

Doing this in the usual order pushes the dots off the visible strip again. The step is identical on the free and paid versions, so it is worth completing before any purchase decision, since it determines whether this approach is workable on that machine at all.

The clock setting that moves the divider

Since macOS 12.4, the menu bar clock has a setting that shows the date only when space allows. The date appearing and disappearing changes the width of the clock, which shifts everything to its left, including the divider.

The documented fix is to stop the toggling: set the date display to always on or always off rather than leaving it space-dependent. Either choice works, and the point is a fixed width rather than a particular preference. The divider can look misplaced immediately after changing the setting, and clicking it or restarting the app puts it back in position.

An external display adds a related wrinkle. Menu bar width depends on the connected display, so a zone layout built on a wide external screen can overflow when the laptop is used alone. Setting the boundaries while on the narrower display keeps both configurations workable.

Deciding what goes to the right of the divider

Sorting by app category produces a layout that gets rearranged within a week. Sorting by click frequency produces one that survives.

Go through the current icons and put each into one of three buckets: clicked today, clicked this week, no memory of ever clicking it.

Clicked today stays to the left of the divider. So does anything read at a glance without clicking, such as battery, input source, or connection state, because collapsing those means expanding the bar just to look at them.
Clicked this week goes into the collapsible zone.
No memory of clicking goes to the far right, or into the removed zone if the paid version is in use.

With the paid version, this is also the moment to set the keyboard shortcut, the five second auto-hide, and launch at login. Setting all three at once means the workflow settles in one sitting instead of being adjusted piecemeal over a fortnight.

Turn on the second dot only after the width allows it

Switching on the option to completely remove icons adds a second dot, and a second dot consumes menu bar width like any other item. On a machine that was already close to the limit, enabling it pushes the leftmost item off the visible strip, and that item disappears without any notification.

The published notch guide flags exactly this: the dots can become invisible right after the remove option is toggled. The safer sequence is to settle the collapsible zone first, reduce the number of permanently visible items, and only then enable the option and drag the new dot into place. If the dots vanish at that moment, switching the option back off restores them, and the attempt can be repeated after quitting a few other menu bar apps to free space.

This also explains a confusing symptom that gets reported as a bug. An icon that was working yesterday and is missing today, on a machine where nothing was uninstalled, is often an overflow casualty rather than a crashed app. The process is still running and its menu bar item is still registered; there is simply no room to draw it.

Re-check permissions after a macOS upgrade

Major system upgrades can drop permission entries, and the symptom is that clicking the dot stops doing anything. The first check is both lists in system settings, Screen Recording and Accessibility, to confirm the entries are still ticked. If they are missing, add them back. If they are present and the app still does nothing, run the full remove-and-re-add procedure described above, since a ticked entry can still point at a stale record.

Check for an app update at the same time, from the dot's menu. The menu bar has changed repeatedly at the system level, through the notch, the clock date behaviour, and tighter permission handling, and the developer has published a guide for each of those changes as it arrived. When behaviour changes after an upgrade, the published help pages are the first place a matching description is likely to appear.

Revisit the layout after two weeks

The first layout is usually slightly wrong, and for a predictable reason. Some background apps communicate through the appearance of their icon, showing a sync failure, a pending update, or a disconnected state. Collapsing those icons removes the channel, and the cost shows up later as something missed rather than immediately as something broken.

After roughly two weeks, run one review with a single question: was anything missed because it was hidden. Move only those icons back. The answer is normally one or two. If it is more than that, the collapsible zone was drawn too wide and the divider should move right.

One structural difference between tools belongs in this review. Reaching a hidden icon can mean expanding the bar, finding the icon, and clicking it, which is two actions for one menu. Some menu bar managers for macOS let a hidden icon be clicked directly while the bar stays collapsed, which removes the expansion step entirely. The feature breakdown and the comparison page cover how that behaviour differs, and it matters most for exactly the icons that ended up in the collapsible zone rather than the removed one.

What to change first

Sort the current icons into the three buckets before touching the divider, and set the clock date to a fixed state so the width stops moving. If the machine has a notch, run the make-space-first sequence before anything else. Then check whether the icons being hidden still need to be clickable in one action, which is the design Koffret is built around.