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Menu bar utilities

The full profile installs Thaw to organise the menu bar and SwiftBar to turn shell scripts into menu bar items. Stats remains an optional manual installation for system metrics. See Homebrew setup for the profile installation.

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

Thaw

Thaw is the menu bar manager selected by this profile. It replaces the former jordanbaird-ice entry.

Installation

brew install --cask thaw

Usage

Open Thaw from Applications and choose which menu bar icons to keep visible. The layout and macOS permissions are configured per user and are not versioned.

Replacing the Brewfile entry does not uninstall an existing Ice installation or migrate its preferences. Check your installed apps before removing anything.

Rollback

brew uninstall --cask thaw

Stats

Stats is optional and is not installed by mac setup.

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)

If you stop using Thaw or SwiftBar, remove its entry from profiles/full/Brewfile as well. Stats has no entry in the current profiles.

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