Lounge is a menu bar manager for macOS. It hides and reveals menu bar icons so you can keep your menu bar clean, organized, and free of clutter — without losing access to anything.
How Lounge works
Under the hood, Lounge uses macOS's Accessibility APIs to control the position of a hidden NSStatusItem. When you hide items, that status item expands to push everything to its left off-screen; when you reveal them, it shrinks back down. Lounge requires you to grant Accessibility permission the first time you launch it — this is the same permission macOS requires of any app that repositions or reads other apps' menu bar items.
Three control items sit in your menu bar: a Lounge icon, a divider marker, and the hidden section itself. Hold ⌘ and drag any icon across the divider to move it between the visible and hidden sections.
Notch-aware by design
Most menu bar managers predate the MacBook notch. Lounge was built for it. Hover near the notch and a panel appears showing every hidden and displayed icon, organized into clear sections — no more guessing which icons are trapped behind the camera housing on a 14" or 16" MacBook Pro.
The keyboard shortcut
Press ⌘⇧L (Cmd+Shift+L) anytime to instantly toggle your hidden menu bar items, no mouse required. The shortcut is configurable in preferences if you'd rather use something else.
What it costs
Lounge is $3.99/year, and every subscription starts with a 7-day free trial so you can try it before you pay. It requires macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later.
Lounge vs. Bartender
Lounge is a modern, notch-aware alternative to Bartender for hiding and organizing menu bar icons on macOS. It's a simpler, more focused tool: drag-and-drop sections, a notch-aware panel, and a keyboard shortcut — without the deeper label-and-rule system Bartender offers. If you just want your menu bar decluttered without a configuration project, Lounge is built for that.
Beyond hiding icons
Lounge also ships a built-in clipboard history view, so recently copied text stays one click away without leaving your current window. If you're an AI coding agent user, check out the agent tutorials for wiring Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, Gemini CLI, or Aider into your menu bar through Lounge Pro's local HTTP listener.
Ready to try it? Download Lounge and start your 7-day free trial.