I used this for something similar, and is very customisable
https://github.com/matryer/xbar
In I hacked my clock to control my focusmatryer
xbar
Go2016–2025
matryer / xbar
xbar
Put the output from any script or program into your macOS Menu Bar (the BitBar reboot)
35Distinct people
38Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
18.1KGitHub stars
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What it is
Put the output from any script or program into your macOS Menu Bar (the BitBar reboot)
GitHub
Where it is used
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Also in these discussions
- swiftbar/swiftbar · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year38 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-01-04 13:42:19 UTC to 2025-05-12 02:43:04 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 3 | 9 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 2 | 8 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Welcome to xbar
xbar (the BitBar reboot) lets you put the output from any script/program in your macOS menu bar.
Complete rewrite from the ground up - in Go by @matryer and @leaanthony - using Wails.app (build cross-platform desktop apps using Go & HTML/CSS/JS)
Completely open source
Download latest xbar release - requires macOS Catalina or newer (>= 10.15)
Visit the app homepage at https://xbarapp.com
Get started and installing plugins
Digging deeper:
Browse plugin repository
Guide to writing your own plugins
And finally...
Read the story about how xbar unexpectedly got going
Contributing and special thanks
Get started
Install
Download the latest release of xbar.
Installing plugins
From an xbar menu, choose Preferences > Plugins... to use the xbar app to discover and manage plugins.
You can browse all the plugins online, or write your own.
The Plugin Directory
The plugin directory is folder on your Mac where the plugins live, located at ~/Library/Application Support/xbar/plugins.
If you're transitioning from Bitbar, move your plugins into this new folder to install them
Contributing
If you'd like to contribute a plugin, head over to https://github.com/matryer/xbar-plugins to get started.
Please do not send pull requests to this repo. Open an issue and start a conversation first. PRs will likely not be accepted.
Get started with our Writing plugins guide
Thanks
Special thanks to @leaanthony at https://wails.app and @ianfoo, @gingerbeardman, @iosdeveloper, @muhqu, @m-cat, @mpicard, @tylerb for their help
Thanks to Chris Ryer for the app logo - and to @mazondo for the original
Thanks for all our plugin contributors who have come up with some pretty genius things
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
38 sourcesAnother good name would have been "Barify".
I use a combo of xbar [1] and Menubarx [2]. I used to have several widgets just for system stats but eventually moved to mac-stats [3] for that.
[1] https://github.com/matryer/xbar
[2] https://menubarx.app/
[3] https://github.com/exelban/stats
In Show HN: Badgeify – Add Any App to Your Mac Menu BarXbar: Put the output from any script/program in your macOS menu bar
2 points · Open discussionAlso xbar: https://github.com/matryer/xbar
In Ice – open source menu bar manager for macOS> Sometimes I feel a little sad for Mac users for that they live in an ecosystem where everything is a product.
No need to feel sad.
macOS users can do exactly the same, for free, with an app like xbar [1] or bitbar [2].
[1] https://github.com/matryer/xbar
[2] https://macmenubar.com/bitbar/
In Show HN: Wunderbar – Learn language while working on your MacUsing https://wwebjs.dev/ to read my whatsapp messages,
redis for storage/interop,
and a script written for https://github.com/matryer/xbar for a "GUI",
instead of running WhatsApp Desktop / WhatsApp Web on my machine (very bad for my attention), I have a status bar icon saying when did I last get a message from my wife, and the text of the last few messages.
In Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?Thanks, and yes. I've been a heavy user of https://github.com/matryer/xbar for years. A tool which lets you build menus and actions from bash scripting. Super helpful but they tend to be a bit more static and often breaks with unexpected outputs.
In Show HN: A small utility (repo manager, shortcuts, etc.) I made for devs (macOS)Might be something a more current macOS user would have to answer. I just remember doing this using a little applescript menu icon on the topbar.
edit: now that I think about it, I did use "bitbar" for a while which is actually a little bit more powerful still. I can't find it any more but this looks similar - https://github.com/matryer/xbar#get-started
In WorldWideWeb.appMy macOS laptop always had a four-letter braille string corresponding to the current IPv4 address on the tray, using xbar [1] (formerly BitBar). I'm aware of approximate shapes for frequent addresses so I could quickly recognize them.
The main problem with this approach is that, you can only quickly recognize strings that you already know and you can't quickly decode arbitrary strings. In particular braille glyphs are too similar to each other, like ⢁ and ⠡ which are almost identical. In fact the actual tactile braille has the same issue and can often be decoded only with the context. Something like 1892 braille [2] might be better for encoding arbitrary sequences.
[1] https://github.com/matryer/xbar
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1829_braille
In Show HN: Braille Dumpbirbar isn't developed any more. it's rebooted as xbar
https://github.com/matryer/xbar
In Show HN: Check the things that matter to you in the menubarHow about xbar?
https://github.com/matryer/xbar
In Show HN: I wrote a free Mac app to OCR any text on screenJust updated from BitBar and ran into a small issue since xbar doesn't support custom plugin folders the same way BitBar did (as in a way to change it via the GUI). Thankfully you can just symlink the plugin folder to your old BitBar folder and everything works as expected. I opened an issue for it here: https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/653
In Xbar: The BitBar reboot. Put anything in your macOS menu barNote that this is a rewrite/reboot from the original BitBar that is still marked as beta but has very frequent releases.
There are more details about the motivations and such by the author in the announcement issue: https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/607
In Xbar: The BitBar reboot. Put anything in your macOS menu barThe old repo is archived in the new one https://github.com/matryer/xbar/tree/master/archive/bitbar
In Xbar: The BitBar reboot. Put anything in your macOS menu barShowing the 15 most recent of 38 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.