My Top 3 macOS Menu Bar Apps

Today, I want to share three macOS apps that I use daily. They are lightweight and unobtrusive, which is why I enjoy them so much. I installed all three using Homebrew, but they can be downloaded using alternative methods, which can be discovered in the apps' respective links.

Menu bar apps sit in your Mac's menu bar and can be easily accessed by clicking their icon.

1. Spotify Now Playing

davicorreiajr/spotify-now-playing This is a popup that shows Spotify current playback information, made and tested specially for macOS. It also allows…

brew install --cask spotify-now-playing

brew install --cask spotify-now-playing

Listening to my Spotify music is an essential aid to my work productivity.

This lightweight tool allows me to quickly see what I am listening to and even add it to my playlist. This allows me to avoid the two alternatives to accomplish this.

The first is using Spotify's native app on my phone, which is not ideal. When I work, I prefer to have my phone away from me to remove the possibility of straying to other irrelevant apps on my phone, like social media.

The second is using Spotify's native macOS app, which is not ideal either because I have to switch windows and may get distracted browsing songs.

I like to let a radio or playlist run from my phone, put it away, and then quickly skip a song or add it to my playlist from the menu bar.

2. Night Owl

**🦉 NightOwl - toggle macOS Mojaves dark mode. ** ightOwl allows you to easily manage which of your Apps should stay light, while your system runs in Dark Mode. It's a…n

brew install --cask nightowl

brew install --cask nightowl

Night Owl serves a simple purpose: Toggle dark mode without having to navigate to System Preferences.

And it does exactly that, but with more features!

On my Macbook Pro 2015, I used a similar app called Nightfall, which added a simple icon to the menu bar that would toggle dark mode when clicked.

Unfortunately, this is only compatible with macOS Catalina, and I needed to find an alternative.

Luckily, Night Owl proved to be rich with features, an improvement upon Nightfall.

Scheduling

Night Owl can use your location to automatically shift to dark mode at sunset and light mode at sunrise.

Alternatively, you can provide what times your computer should shift to light and dark mode.

Specific Apps

You can select specific apps to always stay light or dark.

Keyboard Shortcut

Simply press ⌃+⌘ (control + command) any time to toggle dark mode. No app interaction is needed.

3. Rectangle

Rectangle Move and resize windows in macOS using keyboard shortcuts or snap areas

brew install --cask rectangle

brew install --cask rectangle

Rectangle is completely hands-off. It simply introduces keyboard shortcuts to move and resize windows and shows a cheat sheet of the shortcuts when the menu bar icon is clicked.

Similar to Night Owl, I had to upgrade from my macOS Catalina counterpart. In this case, it was Spectacle, which served the same purpose. In fact, Rectangle is based on Spectacle.

Despite being compatible with M1 macs, Rectangle improves in one particular area, unobtrusive keyboard commands.

The main commands I use have the following format:

⌃ + ⌥ (command + option) and then either left, right, up, down, or return to move the window left, right, up, down, or full screen, respectively.

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Thank you for reading. If you use any of the menu bar apps I talked about, please let me know!