[Feature Request]: Show all menu bar items as default

[eyelessjerry]

Check Existing Issues

• I have checked existing issues, and this issue is not a duplicate

Description

It would be better if one could show all menu bar items by default – instead of having to add them manually to Visible items, it would be better to drag them the other way. Maybe there is already a way to have the menu bar default to showing all items without having to add them manually to visible items?

Screenshots

No response

[musiklee]

you can temporarily show all hidden or all always hidden in settings, or via shortcuts, so YOU COULD SEE ALL 3 (without ice bar), but yes, when you click out of it (focus on another screen) these hidden sections go away,

and if you want to see all menu bar items, just put them all in your Visible Section :-)

[eyelessjerry]

Well, I find it hard to recommend using the program without having the bar icons all shown by default. It is possible to click an item and move out of the bar to have all items continue to be visible, but then it hides again if one do anything up there. Mostly think the best features of a menu bar tweaking software are to use the rounded bar; make the distance shorter between the items so all relevant can be shown at the top at once all the time; and maybe for things like rearranging things and possibly hide some items, but this last is not so important for me and I think many others (one of Apples many faults with default settings is hiding too many things users would have use of having visible).

[jordanbaird]

I can see this being useful. Maybe an option during onboarding that asks what you would prefer?

[musiklee]

No offense but, I feel like if this awesome program does not work for you or you don't want to recommend it , You should consider other apps that work for you, maybe pay $20 for Bartender. Maybe it does what you need it to do??? My point is...I appreciate this program, I appreciate Jordan's efforts to provide this to all of us , FREE OF CHARGE!!
Donation optional ...I know Jordan spends hours, days, weeks, months on this, thank you!!So glad I found this gem of a program, and I will recommend it to everyone even though it doesn't do everything I want it to do!!! Thank you Jordan and I am so looking forward to many more great features, some of which I have already suggested!!!

[jordanbaird]

@musiklee I'm always open to people suggesting new features, and I think that is all @eyelessjerry is doing. I appreciate the enthusiastic support, but let's remember that for some (most) people, this is just a piece of software, and like any other piece of software, if it doesn't do what someone needs, they are under no obligation to keep using it, let alone recommend it to others. I see it as my job to implement the reasonable requests that I feel align with my vision for the program, and this is one of those.

[musiklee]

that's fair, apologies @eyelessjerry,
when a piece of software is "free", i appreciate what i get,
as i know it takes time to develop this software
BUT when i pay for it, I expect everything!! LOL
so i expect my custom colors for my hidden ice bars,
i'll buy you a coffee. :-)

[eyelessjerry]

Just meant it literally as I was thinking of mentioning it in a newsletter. I like ICE myself and have no big problem with it not working this way myself. Also Bartender seemed not totally great and I was also not happy about the “odd” takeover there. Anyway just a thought from me.

[jordanbaird]

@eyelessjerry I can assure you I'm taking your request seriously. I'll work on implementing it as soon as I'm able (although it may be a while, I'm kind of swamped haha). Sorry you were unfairly attacked.

[itaiferber]

+1 to this suggestion. I'd love this because not all the applications I use which show a status bar item show it 100% of the time; critically for me, my mail client (MailMate) shows a status item for unread emails only when the count is >0, and as an inbox-zero person, it can appear and reappear many times a day.

At the moment, every time the status bar item is removed and re-added by the app, Ice recognizes it as a new status bar item, so it moves to the Always Hidden section — if I could set Ice to show new icons in the Visible Section by default, I wouldn't lose it throughout the day. (I don't personally need anything fancy, like reinserting into the same position it disappeared from, since I keep the icon at the end of the Always Visible section regardless to keep things from shifting around.)

I'm kind of swamped haha

@jordanbaird, do you accept contributions? I'd be happy to investigate adding this myself, but I wouldn't want to make more work for you.

[jordanbaird]

@itaiferber I think what you're describing is actually something different.

A little bit of explanation as to why:

Ice hides menu bar items by creating an extremely long item of its own, which pushes all items to its left off the screen. Then, to show the items, it simply adjusts the length of the long item to 0. It does this for both sections, so there are actually two of these items. For reference, I refer to them as control items internally.

As an aside, this is why new items are moved to the always-hidden section – because macOS places new items at the far left of the menu bar.

To implement this feature, the plan is to adjust the initial location of the control items on first launch, depending on whether the user chooses to show or hide all items (probably presented as an option in a dialog after permissions are granted). This would be a one-time option that simply decides the initial configuration of Ice.

I think what you want is actually #6, which has to wait until #26 is implemented, as we will then have a way to keep track of which items are new. While I do accept minor contributions, these are features that will be intrinsic to the way Ice works in the future, and as the primary maintainer of the app, I need to be able to fully understand their implementations. So I feel like these are features that I will need to implement myself. Not ideal for speed of development, but I want to make sure the quality of the app is the highest it can possibly be.

[itaiferber]

Ice hides menu bar items by creating an extremely long item of its own, which pushes all items to its left off the screen. Then, to show the items, it simply adjusts the length of the long item to 0. It does this for both sections, so there are actually two of these items. For reference, I refer to them as control items internally.

Ah, understood! I started reading through the Ice source, but didn't get quite far enough to reach this understanding. I thought things might work with a combination of NSStatusItem.isVisible and updating NSStatusItem Preferred Position for status items in memory. Good to know the implementation is different!

I think what you want is actually #6, which has to wait until #26 is implemented, as we will then have a way to keep track of which items are new.

Ah, yes! Sorry for the noise.

While I do accept minor contributions, these are features that will be intrinsic to the way Ice works in the future, and as the primary maintainer of the app, I need to be able to fully understand their implementations.

That makes absolute sense. Thanks for your hard work on this! I hope you manage to get to a solution you're happy with — looking forward to getting to use Ice more in the future!

[lukestein]

I'd like to just add a +1 for this feature suggestion (with a note of appreciation to Jordan for a very cool tool)

My use case is that I generally want to keep everything showing, but hide many items (including some that show upcoming calendar appointments etc.) using Ice when I'm recording or screen-sharing. So whenever I turn my Mac I tend to click Ice's "show/hide" button and would appreciate an option to be able to have everything shown by default.

Merci!

[bunducafe]

+1 to this suggestion. I'd love this because not all the applications I use which show a status bar item show it 100% of the time; critically for me, my mail client (MailMate) shows a status item for unread emails only when the count is >0, and as an inbox-zero person, it can appear and reappear many times a day.

At the moment, every time the status bar item is removed and re-added by the app, Ice recognizes it as a new status bar item, so it moves to the Always Hidden section — if I could set Ice to show new icons in the Visible Section by default, I wouldn't lose it throughout the day. (I don't personally need anything fancy, like reinserting into the same position it disappeared from, since I keep the icon at the end of the Always Visible section regardless to keep things from shifting around.)

I'm kind of swamped haha

@jordanbaird, do you accept contributions? I'd be happy to investigate adding this myself, but I wouldn't want to make more work for you.

+1 for this. Same app, same issue. Would love to get that working again because it's very much my workflow to look for new mails in the menu bar.

[jordanbaird]

@bunducafe You're looking for #6.

[jordanbaird]

I have a plan for how this is going to work:

Once #6 is implemented, add an option on first launch of the app to choose the location of new menu bar items. Once the user has made their selection, items are hidden accordingly. From there, they can adjust the location as needed, but this will make the initial configuration easier.

So this is blocked by #6 currently.