The menu bar is the most underrated screen space on a Mac. It's always visible, it never covers your editor, and one click gets you whatever lives there. That makes it the right home for the things a developer checks constantly but doesn't want a whole window for.
Here are the seven menu bar apps I'd install on a fresh dev Mac. Six of them are free.
1. Ice: tame the menu bar itself
Free and open source: Ice on GitHub
Once you install a few of the apps below, the menu bar gets crowded fast, and on a MacBook with a notch, icons simply disappear behind it. Ice lets you hide icons you rarely need behind a click, keep the important ones always visible, and rearrange everything. Install this one first.
2. Stats: CPU, memory, network and battery at a glance
Free and open source: Stats on GitHub
When a build, a Docker container or a local model starts eating your machine, you want to know before the fans tell you. Stats puts small, configurable readouts for CPU, GPU, memory, disk, network and battery in the menu bar, with a detailed dropdown per module. Turn on only the two or three you actually watch.
3. Maccy: clipboard history you'll use every hour
Free and open source: maccy.app
Developers copy constantly: a commit hash, an error message, a token, a path. Maccy keeps a searchable history of everything you've copied, opened with a keyboard shortcut. Tip: add your password manager to its ignore list so secrets don't end up in the history.
4. Rectangle: window layouts from the keyboard
Free and open source: rectangleapp.com
Editor on the left, terminal on the right, browser on the second screen. Rectangle snaps windows into halves, thirds and corners with shortcuts, and its menu bar icon lists every layout if you forget a shortcut. Recent macOS versions have some tiling built in, but Rectangle is still faster from the keyboard.
5. Amphetamine: keep the Mac awake when it matters
Free: Mac App Store
Long test suites, big downloads, a migration running over SSH, or an AI agent working through a refactor all hate a sleeping Mac. Amphetamine keeps it awake for a set time, while an app is running, or until a process finishes, all from a menu bar toggle.
6. Itsycal: a calendar that doesn't need a window
Free: mowglii.com/itsycal
A tiny calendar in the menu bar that shows your upcoming events. It's the quickest way to check whether you have twenty minutes before standup without opening Calendar and losing your place.
7. TokenBar: Claude, Codex and other AI usage and cost
$15 lifetime: tokenbar.site
If you use AI coding tools, the number you most need to see is how close you are to your limit. Claude Code, Codex and the others each track usage, reset windows and cost in a different place. TokenBar puts them in one menu bar readout, so you see that a five-hour window is almost used up before an agent stops mid-task. It's built on CodexBar, an MIT-licensed open-source project, and needs macOS 14 or later.
Disclosure: I built TokenBar.
A few menu bar habits that help
- Keep it short. Five or six always-visible icons is plenty. Hide the rest with Ice.
- Prefer readouts over badges. A number you can glance at (CPU %, usage %) beats an icon that only changes when something's wrong.
- Give each app a shortcut. Most of these apps support a global hotkey, which is faster than aiming the mouse at a 16-pixel icon.
What's in your menu bar right now? I'm always looking for the one app I didn't know I needed.
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