Vanilla For Mac

macOS apps that also come with menulets are quite frequent on Macs, and this means that most of the time your status bar is filled to the brink with icons, right up to the current app's menu.

To fight this, you can either close some of the apps that come with a menulet or hide them out using an application such as Vanilla.

In short, the Vanilla macOS app is designed to help you conceal some of your menu extras behind a digital wall, represented in your menu bar by a " < " sign.

This allows you to have all the apps you need running at all times, while also stashing away the status items that don't look too good or are animated and distract you from the task at hand.

Using Vanilla is quite straightforward since all that you have to do to hide a menulet is to drag it behind the app's dot in the status bar while holding down the ⌘ key on your keyboard.

Once you tuck away all the status item you no longer want to see in your menu bar, Vanilla will allow you to hide them by clicking on its " < " status item. Afterward, all the menu extras you wanted to hide will be concealed, and the only icon still visible in their place will be Vanilla's " > " symbol.

Although while running it using only its free features accomplishes most of the things you would want from such an app, upon registration you can use its Pro features that will also make it possible to have it launch automatically upon login and to completely remove status bar items from your Mac's menu bar.

Given that Vanilla has just been released, it does come with enough features to justify the price tag on its Pro features, but it would be nice if in the future Vanilla will also have global hot-key support, as well as support for automatically displaying the menulets that update after being hidden.

In a nutshell, Vanilla is a minimalist and quite useful little utility created to fill a particular niche in the macOS software world: apps capable of hiding and removing other applications' status bar items to keep one's Mac status bar a lot cleaner.

And, from the looks of it, Vanilla does it perfectly, albeit it might still benefit from a larger pack of features.