What GreatBar is

A menu bar you build yourself: the websites, apps, files and folders you open every day, one click from the top of the screen.

The things you open every day are scattered: a browser tab you keep losing, an app three folders down in Launchpad, a project folder you navigate to by hand, a chat you open by searching for a person’s name. GreatBar puts them where nothing else is: the top right of the screen, one click away, always in the same place.

It is a Mac app that lives in the menu bar and nowhere else. No Dock icon, no window that stays open, no account, and nothing sent anywhere.

What can go in the menu bar

Each of these is one icon, or one row inside a group’s menu:

• A website. It opens in a panel that hangs under its own icon, in a window of its own, or in your browser. See Websites in a panel.
• An app. Handed to macOS, which brings it forward, exactly as the Dock would.
• A file or a folder. Opened in whatever you choose: a folder in the Finder from one shortcut and in Terminal from another. See Shortcuts.
• A link into an app. A Slack channel, a WhatsApp chat, a Figma file, a Zoom meeting, an Apple Shortcut to run, or any System Settings pane by name. See Links into apps.
• A group. One icon that drops a menu of any of the above, with groups inside it. See Groups.
• A divider. A hairline between the icons, or a heading inside a menu.

The four ideas worth knowing

The menu bar is shared, and it runs out. How much room there is depends on your screen and on what else is already up there; when it runs out, macOS hides items from the far end. Groups are how a bar that wants twenty things can be a few icons wide, and bars are how a Mac that is a work Mac in the morning and a home Mac in the evening keeps two menu bars instead of one crowded one. Nothing stops you filling a wide screen with icons if that is what you want.

A page opened in GreatBar stays as you left it. The panel is not a browser tab that gets closed and reopened: it keeps its scroll position and its logins between opens, and the panel closing is not the page ending. A page can even keep playing after you close it.

Two shortcuts to one site can be two people. An account in GreatBar is a browsing profile of its own, so work Gmail and personal Gmail are two icons with two sets of logins, not one you keep signing in and out of. See Accounts.

Everything answers to the keyboard. Hold a pair of modifiers and every icon says which number it is; press the number and it opens, from wherever you are. See Keyboard.

What it is not

• Not a browser. It has no tab bar, no bookmarks and no history to manage. It shows the pages you told it to show, and hands anything else to your browser.
• Not a launcher you type into. There is no search field to invoke. What is on the bar is what you put there, and reaching it is a click or a key, not a query.
• Not a service. There is no GreatBar account, no sync and no server. Your shortcuts are a file in the app’s own container on this Mac.

What it needs

macOS 14 or later, on Apple silicon or Intel. The app is sandboxed, signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, and it updates itself from this site. It is free for now, while it is new.

Ready? Getting started installs it and puts the first thing on the bar.