Frost

Frost is a powerful menu bar manager for macOS. It hides, shows, and rearranges menu bar items, and can restyle the menu bar itself. It works on macOS 26 Tahoe.

Frost continues Ice by Jordan Baird, which is no longer maintained. It is built on Ice's unreleased macOS 26 branch plus community fixes that were never merged upstream.

Install

1. Download Frost.zip from the latest release and move Frost.app to your Applications folder.

2. Frost isn't notarized by Apple yet, so macOS blocks it the first time. Clear the download flag in Terminal:

   xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Frost.app

3. Open Frost from Applications or Finder (not by running the binary from Terminal, which gives the permissions to Terminal instead). Grant Accessibility and Screen & System Audio Recording when asked, then quit and reopen Frost so Screen Recording takes effect.

If Frost says permissions are missing although they look enabled in System Settings, reset them and grant them again:

tccutil reset Accessibility com.sciencialab.Frost
tccutil reset ScreenCapture com.sciencialab.Frost

If you used Ice before, Frost imports your Ice settings the first time it launches.

Or install with Homebrew:

brew install --cask sciencialab/tap/frost

Frost updates itself through Sparkle.

Building from source

Open Ice.xcodeproj in Xcode 26 and run the Ice scheme, or build an ad-hoc signed Frost.zip the same way CI does:

Scripts/build.sh

Releasing

1. Set MARKETING_VERSION and increase CURRENT_PROJECT_VERSION (the build number Sparkle compares) in the project.
2. Merge to main, then run the Release workflow on main from the Actions tab (it creates the v<version> tag), or push a matching tag such as v0.2.0.

The Release workflow builds and signs Frost.zip, publishes the GitHub release, adds it to the update feed (website/appcast.xml), and redeploys the website. It needs the SPARKLE_PRIVATE_KEY repository secret, matching SUPublicEDKey in Ice/Resources/Info.plist. With the TAP_GITHUB_TOKEN secret (a fine-grained token with Contents read and write access to ScienciaLAB/homebrew-tap), it also updates the Homebrew cask.

Features/Roadmap

Menu bar item management

• Hide menu bar items
• "Always-hidden" menu bar section
• Show hidden menu bar items when hovering over the menu bar
• Show hidden menu bar items when an empty area in the menu bar is clicked
• Show hidden menu bar items by scrolling or swiping in the menu bar
• Automatically rehide menu bar items
• Hide application menus when they overlap with shown menu bar items
• Drag and drop interface to arrange individual menu bar items
• Display hidden menu bar items in a separate bar (e.g. for MacBooks with the notch)
• Search menu bar items
• Menu bar item spacing (BETA)
• Profiles for menu bar layout
• Individual spacer items
• Menu bar item groups
• Show menu bar items when trigger conditions are met

Menu bar appearance

• Menu bar tint (solid and gradient)
• Menu bar shadow
• Menu bar border
• Custom menu bar shapes (rounded and/or split)
• Remove background behind menu bar
• Rounded screen corners
• Different settings for light/dark mode

Hotkeys

• Toggle individual menu bar sections
• Show the search panel
• Enable/disable the Frost Bar
• Show/hide section divider icons
• Toggle application menus
• Enable/disable auto rehide
• Temporarily show individual menu bar items

Other

• Launch at login
• Automatic updates
• Menu bar widgets

Why does Frost only support macOS 14 and later?

Frost uses a number of system APIs that are available starting in macOS 14. As such, there are no plans to support earlier versions of macOS.

Gallery

Show hidden menu bar items below the menu bar

Drag-and-drop interface to arrange menu bar items

Customize the menu bar's appearance

Menu bar item search

Custom menu bar item spacing

Credits

Frost is a fork of Ice, created by Jordan Baird. The macOS 26 support also includes fixes contributed to Ice by its community.

License

Frost is available under the GPL-3.0 license.