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Menu bar utilities

This page covers the three menu bar tools in this setup: Ice organizes the menu bar, Stats shows system metrics, and SwiftBar turns shell scripts into menu bar items (used here for uptime monitoring). All three are installed through Homebrew and declared in the project Brewfile; see Homebrew setup to install everything at once.

macOS menu bar with SwiftBar, Stats, CodexBar, and keyboard layout indicators

Ice

Ice is a macOS menu bar manager. It is installed as jordanbaird-ice and helps keep menu bar utilities readable when several development tools are running.

Installation

brew install --cask jordanbaird-ice

Verify the installation:

brew list --cask jordanbaird-ice

Usage

Open Ice from Applications or with:

open -a Ice

Use it to hide low-priority menu bar icons and keep important indicators visible. The exact menu bar layout is user-specific and is not versioned in this repository.

Ice showing expanded and compact macOS menu bar states

Rollback

brew uninstall --cask jordanbaird-ice

Stats

Stats is a macOS menu bar system monitor. It displays CPU, memory, disk, network, battery, and sensor information without opening a terminal.

Installation

brew install --cask stats

Verify the installation:

brew list --cask stats

Usage

Open Stats from Applications or with:

open -a Stats

Use it for quick local resource checks before reaching for terminal tools such as glances or ctop. Preferences are stored in the user's Library and are not versioned, as they include machine-specific sensor choices.

Stats menu bar GPU metrics dropdown

Rollback

brew uninstall --cask stats

SwiftBar

SwiftBar turns any shell script into a macOS menu bar item. Every script in a designated folder runs on a configurable schedule and its output is shown in the menu bar. It is used here for lightweight VPS and website uptime monitoring — no external service or background daemon required.

Installation

brew install --cask swiftbar

On first launch, SwiftBar asks for a Plugin Directory — a folder where it looks for scripts. Choose a versioned location:

~/Documents/swiftbar-plugins/

Script naming convention

The filename encodes the refresh interval:

uptime.5m.sh      # every 5 minutes
memory.30s.sh     # every 30 seconds
disk.1h.sh        # every hour

Supported units: s (seconds), m (minutes), h (hours), d (days).

Writing a plugin

Every script must be executable and print to stdout. The first line becomes the menu bar title; lines after --- become dropdown items.

#!/bin/bash
# uptime.5m.sh — check HTTP status of a site

STATUS=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://example.com)

if [ "$STATUS" = "200" ]; then
  echo "✅ example.com"
else
  echo "🔴 example.com ($STATUS)"
fi

Make the script executable:

chmod +x ~/Documents/swiftbar-plugins/uptime.5m.sh

SwiftBar picks it up automatically; no restart required.

Multi-site monitoring

Check multiple sites from a single script to keep the menu bar compact:

#!/bin/bash
# sites.5m.sh

SITES=(
  "https://example.com"
  "https://api.example.com/health"
)

ALL_OK=true
DETAIL="---"

for URL in "${SITES[@]}"; do
  CODE=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" --max-time 5 "$URL")
  if [ "$CODE" = "200" ]; then
    DETAIL="$DETAIL\n✅ $URL"
  else
    DETAIL="$DETAIL\n🔴 $URL ($CODE)"
    ALL_OK=false
  fi
done

if $ALL_OK; then
  echo "✅ Sites"
else
  echo "🔴 Sites"
fi

printf "%b\n" "$DETAIL"

This repository also ships a reusable plugin:

mkdir -p ~/Documents/swiftbar-plugins
mkdir -p ~/.config/swiftbar
ln -sf "$PWD/scripts/swiftbar/sites.5m.sh" ~/Documents/swiftbar-plugins/sites.5m.sh
cp configs/swiftbar/sites.conf.example ~/.config/swiftbar/sites.conf
chmod +x scripts/swiftbar/sites.5m.sh

Run these from the repository root so $PWD resolves to the checkout. Then edit the local config:

~/.config/swiftbar/sites.conf

Keep configuration files outside ~/Documents/swiftbar-plugins/. SwiftBar may automatically mark files in its plugin directory as executable, so non-plugin files can appear as broken ? menu bar items.

Each non-comment line follows this format:

label|url|expected_statuses|timeout_seconds|slow_threshold_ms

Example:

Homepage|https://example.com|200|8|1500
API Health|https://api.example.com/health|200,204|5|800
Redirect Check|https://example.com/login|200,302|8|1500

The plugin shows Website OK when every check matches the expected HTTP status, and Website FAIL when at least one site times out or returns an unexpected status. The slow_threshold_ms field is optional and defaults to 1500. Dropdown rows are clickable and open the checked URL. The dropdown also shows the average response time, number of slow sites, slowest site, and last check time.

SwiftBar website monitoring dropdown

Dropdown actions

Lines after --- in the script output can be made interactive with SwiftBar parameters such as refresh, href, and bash (run a script on click):

---
Refresh now | refresh=true
Open dashboard | href=https://example.com/dashboard
Run backup | bash=/path/to/backup.sh terminal=false

Hiding a plugin temporarily

Rename the file with a leading . to disable it without deleting it:

mv uptime.5m.sh .uptime.5m.sh

Rollback

brew uninstall --cask swiftbar

Plugin scripts in the plugin directory are not removed automatically.

Rollback (all)

After uninstalling any of these casks, remove its entry from profiles/full/Brewfile.

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