Overflow

A Windows-style overflow tray for macOS menu bar icons.

Stash the icons you rarely need behind a chevron. Click it and they appear in a popout tray under the menu bar — click one there and it works exactly as if it were still in the bar.

Why

Menu bars fill up fast (and the notch makes it worse). Existing hiders like Hidden Bar just shove icons off-screen — to use one you have to un-hide everything first. Overflow keeps them one click away in a tray, the way the Windows system tray has done forever.

How it works

• Stash icons: hold ⌘ and drag menu bar icons to the left of the thin | divider. They're pushed off the menu bar.

  

  (shown inline-expanded — everything left of the | gets stashed)

• Open the tray: click the v chevron.

  

  Stashed icons show up at their real size, in rows. Click any icon — left or right click — and Overflow forwards the click to the real item: it briefly slides back into the bar, its menu opens right where you'd expect, and it re-stashes automatically when the menu closes.

• Show everything inline: option-click the chevron (or use the right-click menu). The chevron flips to ❯; click it again to re-stash.

• Settings: right-click the chevron → Settings… — icons per row, spacing between icons, launch at login.

  

The chevron tells you the state at a glance: v at rest, ^ while the tray is open, ❯ when everything is shown inline.

Permissions

Both optional, both recommended — the app degrades gracefully without them:

• Screen Recording — used to photograph the stashed icons so the tray shows the real, live images. Without it you get generic placeholders.
• Accessibility — used to forward tray clicks to the real items via synthetic mouse events. Without it, clicking a tray icon just reveals the menu bar icons for 8 seconds so you can click the real one.

Building

Works with Command Line Tools only (no Xcode needed):

CODESIGN_IDENTITY="Your Dev Cert" Scripts/build-app.sh
rm -rf /Applications/Overflow.app && cp -R build/Overflow.app /Applications/

Sign with a stable identity (a self-signed code-signing certificate works) — macOS ties TCC permissions to the code signature, so ad-hoc signing re-asks for permissions on every rebuild. Install by rm -rf + cp -R, never by copying over the existing bundle.

The app icon comes from SupportFiles/AppIcon-source.png (1024×1024 with transparent squircle corners). After replacing it, regenerate SupportFiles/AppIcon.icns with Scripts/make-icns.sh.

macOS 26 (Tahoe) implementation notes

These constraints shaped the design; they differ from what Hidden Bar / Ice era write-ups describe:

• Status items are hosted out-of-process by Control Centre. Every status-item window (layer 25) is owned by the Control Centre process, so window ownership can no longer identify which app an item belongs to.
• Each item has one window copy per display and per Space (extra desktops and fullscreen apps multiply them, at identical coordinates), and a display whose menu bar auto-hides parks its entire row off-screen. Scans must be restricted to a single display's menu-bar row (y-band filter) and then collapse overlapping frames — distinct items never overlap, per-Space duplicates always do.
• Off-screen windows cannot be captured. Both SCScreenshotManager (error -3811) and the legacy CGWindowListCreateImage (nil) refuse windows that are fully off-screen, even though SCShareableContent lists them. Hence the cache-and-flash strategy: icons are photographed while visible (at launch, and via a brief ~0.5 s reveal when the tray needs an image it doesn't have — Refresh Icon Images in the right-click menu forces one).
• The 10,000-point separator trick still works for pushing items off-screen (the system clamps the window to ~5,000 pt but behavior is unchanged), and NSStatusBarButton.window still reports a real on-screen frame, so popout anchoring works.
• Re-stash timing after a forwarded click can't watch the target app's windows (ownership is useless) — instead a watcher looks globally for new transient windows (menus/popovers/panels) and re-stashes when they close.

Debugging

defaults write com.bnewable.Overflow debugLogging -bool true

then watch /tmp/overflow-state.log for flash-capture stats.