Bartender 7 Release Notes

This update improves opening Notification Center while Bartender is hiding items, and makes refreshing menu bar item images less disruptive while you're working.

Fixes

• Fixed Fn+N not opening or closing Notification Center when menu bar items are hidden. This also supports custom Notification Center shortcuts configured in System Settings.
• Improved clicking the clock to open Notification Center, including shortly after launch or while Bartender is arranging your items.
• Reduced menu bar flickering when opening Notification Center.
• Prevent repeated attempts to refresh hidden-item images when they're failing to capture. You can retry using “Recapture Items” on the Layout page.
• Improved menu bar image capture after moving or revealing items, and prevented stalled captures from holding up the refresh.
• Corrected the message shown when launching this build on an unsupported version of macOS to say it requires macOS 27 or later.

This update fixes issues with items failing to appear, getting stuck while moving, or shifting around after a restart—especially spacers.

There’s also a suite of updates to the clipboard helper in our new Command Bar, making the experience slicker across more use cases.

Fixes

• Removed the need to enable “Allow hiding system items” to move Control Center items like the battery indicator or Wi-Fi. This toggle now only enables showing and hiding the clock and Control Center’s bento box.
• Updated some permission requests under Advanced settings to ask for specific files instead of Full Disk Access. This is a fully optional experimental feature, and Bartender does not require Full Disk Access to function.
• Fixed localization for English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese. The widgets section is currently untranslated, but will be localized in a future release.
• Fixed an issue where the menu bar could get stuck on some builds of macOS 27. Bartender will now refresh the bar for you. You can turn this behaviour off under Advanced settings. If you’re not using Screen Recording, Bartender will show a “Refresh menu bar” button so you can do this manually.
• Prevented issues where a moved app could show “clones” of itself without icons in the dropped section.
• Added an explanation of how macOS 27 hides or shows every menu bar item from an app together. This message can be dismissed and won’t appear again.
• Added a compatibility notice prompting you to update older versions of known incompatible menu items that have shipped Golden Gate updates.
• Prevented delayed moves when an item is hidden by Control Center.
• Fixed the item mover getting stuck and never restarting.
• Added guidance when access is missing, with a “Grant Access” button on the Layout page.
• Stopped the Bartender Bar preview briefly showing “no hidden items” after launch, or appearing empty when you haven’t hidden any items yet.
• Updated the onboarding permissions helper guidance to make setup easier to finish.
• Fixed an issue that could cause items, especially spacers, to shift around after a restart.

Clipboard improvements

• Paste clipboard items into the previously focused app. This should work in most apps—yes, even Electron ones—but please let us know if you find an app where it doesn’t.
• Support keyboard selection with Up/Down and Enter.
• Added paste, copy, pin, unpin, and delete actions.
• Improved clipboard item icons and file/image display.
• Refresh the list after pinning or deleting items.

Fixes

• Fixes an issue with granting file access during onboarding

Bartender Seven is now available. Some highlights of our best Bartender ever are below, and you can learn more here.

This build of Bartender is only available for macOS 27, with support for Tahoe coming shortly after launch.

New

• The new Bartender works entirely without your mouse. We can switch our your menu bar in an instant, enabling triggers like showing stat menus when you're working in Xcode, or hiding the entire menu bar before you hop on a presentation.
• Screen Recording is now fully optional. Bartender works better with it, but you can still arrange your items just fine without it - you'll just see app icons instead of actual menu bar item images.
• Bartender Command Bar unifies quick search, activating presets, viewing/running your automations, and if you've got Bartender Pro, your clipboard history. This new Command Bar allows for mouse-free interaction with Bartender, allowing workflows like grabbing your weather app and quickly checking it - without lifting a finger.
• Triggers have been renamed to Automation, and includes a fresh take on triggers that are easier to use, and more reliable. There's scheduled triggers, a much simpler UX ( without taking away any options ), and an easier way to select what items it should show, or profiles to apply.
• App Intents are now available from Bartender, exposing the same options as Applescript. You can get items, show/click them, change profiles, toggle your bar, and more.
• Hotkeys have been expanded with new options, including a "Focus Mode" which allows you to hide everything in your menu bar with one quick shortcut. This works without distrupting your mouse, and allows you to clean things up for screen recordings. You can also quickly enable a preset with a hotkey.
• Bartender will now allow you to hide system items such as the clock, or control center. These items can't be moved around inside the shown section, but you can choose to hide them if you wish. This option is hidden behind a flag in the advanced page for now, as hiding some system items will prevent system UI like the volume pop-up from correctly working.
• Presets can now be sync'd to your monitor setups without using a trigger. This allows you to have a preset based on monitor, or monitor combination. It's cleaner than ever to have a setup for your Macbook display that automatically switches up when you connect your Studio Display.
• Presets have been simplified to live inside the layout page, so every interaction with "stuff in the bar" now lives in one spot.
• The footprint of Bartender is lighter than ever, with most users seeing under 100mb of memory usage at idle. We'll continue to reduce this over time, and lower the footprint of more advanced features like triggers.

Known Issues

• "New items appear here" may not work as expected.
• Applying a larger profile change may be slow to fully resolve the order of your items.
• Some apps, like iStat menus, don't currently work with Bartender, and are automatically hidden. We're working on compatibility with specific apps like this, so if you find one that doesn't play nice with Bartender, please send it to us. If you're a developer of an app that doesn't work, we'd love to work with you on some Golden Gate updates ( its a super quick change )
• When an app has multiple bar items, you can re-arrange them independently, but hiding any of them will hide all of them.
• Some edge cases exist with the new native macOS overflow, that cause the bar to temporarily flicker for a sec whilst we re-arrange. The best way to handle this is to enable "Move items that don't fit on-screen into Hidden"
• Some item images may be slightly out of date. We'll be adding a "refresh frequency" in a coming update to let you control this