Bars
Work and home, or a project at a time: a bar is a menu bar of its own, and switching brings all of its icons.
A bar is a whole menu bar of its own. Switch to another and its icons take the place of the first bar’s, all at once. Nothing on the other bars is touched; they are simply not showing.
A new Mac starts with two, Work and Personal, because switching is the one thing a single bar can never demonstrate.
What a bar is for
- Work and home. The bar you want at 10am is not the bar you want at 8pm.
- A project at a time. The repo, the design file, the staging site and the client’s Slack, together, and gone when the project is.
- A mode. A Focus bar with three things on it and nothing else.
Only the bar showing takes room in the menu bar, so four bars of six icons are twenty-four things without a menu bar twenty-four icons wide.
Switching bars
| How | Where it works |
|---|---|
| ⌃⌘← and ⌃⌘→ | Anywhere. The whole menu bar changes. |
| The wheel, or a two-finger swipe, over any icon in the menu bar | Over GreatBar’s own icons only, so it takes nothing from anything else. Down or right is the bar after. |
| GreatBar’s own menu (⌃⌘G) | Every bar is listed, the one showing is ticked, and a bar’s submenu starts with Switch to This Bar. |
| The sidebar in GreatBar’s window | Right-click a bar and Switch to This Bar. |
The wheel can be turned off in Settings › Scroll to switch bars, and the keys under Number keys. See Settings.
GreatBar’s own menu
The mark at the end of GreatBar’s icons opens the app’s own menu, and it is short on purpose: every bar, then Settings, then Quit.
Every bar’s submenu holds everything on that bar, as a flat list with the groups as submenus, so anything on any bar is reachable from here even when the menu bar had no room for it. Every row has its own menu behind ⌥, exactly as in a group’s dropdown, and the last row is Edit Bar…, which opens the window on that bar.
⌃⌘A opens a shorter menu: just what is in the menu bar right now, as a flat list. Arrows walk it, a letter jumps, Return opens.
Making, renaming and deleting
In GreatBar’s window, the sidebar has the bars at the top and New Bar under them. A right click on one offers Switch to This Bar, Rename, Export Bar… and Delete. Deleting takes the shortcuts on it with it, so it asks first, and the last bar always stays: there is no state where GreatBar has no bar at all.
Moving a shortcut between bars
Drag it onto the other bar’s name in the sidebar, or use Move to Bar on its right-click menu. Everything it was set to goes with it: where it opens, its size, its icon, and the account it uses, since accounts belong to the app rather than to a bar.
Sharing a bar
Export Bar… writes the bar out as a .greatbar document: a plain file to send to
another Mac or another person. Opening one there shows a review of what it would add, with
a verdict beside each row, and nothing lands until it is applied. It always arrives as
something to add, with fresh ids, so it can never overwrite what somebody already has.