Icons

Every symbol macOS can draw, an emoji, up to three letters or a picture from the web, in a colour of your choosing.

An icon in the menu bar is 16 points wide and has to be recognised at a glance, out of the corner of an eye, next to the Wi-Fi symbol. That is a different job from a Dock icon, so GreatBar lets you choose a mark rather than only inheriting one.

The picker

Icon in a shortcut’s editor opens it. Five tabs, and a row of colours under the ones that can take a colour.

Default

The icon the shortcut would have anyway: an app’s own, a file’s kind as the Finder draws it, or a website’s favicon. A web link with no icon of its own fetches the site’s favicon the first time it needs one, from that site, and keeps it. Use It comes back here from any other tab.

Symbol

Every SF Symbol this Mac can draw, some eight thousand of them, in the categories macOS puts them in, with a search field over the grid. Eight small categories are offered first, for the things people actually put on a bar: Web, People, Work, Files, Code, Design, Home and Signs. Typing an exact symbol name that is not in the grid offers Use what you typed, so a symbol GreatBar has not catalogued is still reachable by name.

A symbol is drawn by the app, which is why it takes a colour and always sits at the right weight beside the system’s own icons.

Emoji

The same grid, in the usual categories: Smileys, People, Nature, Food, Activity, Travel, Objects and Symbols. An emoji arrives with its colours, so there is no colour row for it.

Letter

Up to three characters, drawn as text. JW for a person, API for a dashboard, 1 for the first of something. It takes a colour like a symbol.

Image

The address of a picture on the web: a PNG, a JPEG or an SVG. It is fetched once and kept, so the icon does not depend on that site being up every morning.

Colours

Ten colours, and As it comes, which leaves the icon alone: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Teal, Blue, Indigo, Purple, Pink and Graphite. They are chosen to read on both a light and a dark menu bar.

A symbol and letters are drawn by GreatBar, so they take any of the ten. An emoji, a picture, an app’s own icon and a favicon arrive coloured already, and the only thing worth offering there is Monochrome: drawn without its colours, so it sits quietly beside the system’s own icons. That is often the right answer for a bar with many icons on it.

Dividers take colour too

A divider is a line rather than a mark, but it has the same two controls: a colour, and an opacity from 5% to 100%. Left alone, a line looks like every other line on the screen and follows dark and light with them; fading it is how a line separates without drawing the eye. A divider with a name is a heading, and the colour goes to the text instead. See Shortcuts.

A shortcut in the bar shows its icon; a shortcut in a group’s menu shows the same icon at menu size, beside its name.
A page that is playing wears a dot while it plays, so you know which icon to press to get back to it. See Windows.
Holding the number-key modifiers puts a small digit on every icon, so nothing has to be counted. See Keyboard.
A menu bar with no room left hides icons from the far end, exactly as macOS does with everything else up there. What is hidden is still in GreatBar’s own menu.