snwe For Mac

snwe is an open source and lightweight Electron-based replacement for the macOS menu bar, designed to behave like an app launcher, system monitoring tool and music player interface.

Even though the snwe utility is not meant to replace the functionality available within the macOS menu bar entirely, it intends to eventually offer you all the tools needed to substitute it without missing any of its features.

This being said, we have to mention the fact that snwe is still in a very early development stage, with the first 0.1.0 release candidate being launched a couple of months ago. That translates into a few bugs not found yet and a lot of features still waiting to be included.

Given that the snwe app is open source and it comes with a modular architecture, it is effortless to extend by creating your own widgets, themes, and indicators.

Once launched, snwe will show up at the top of your Mac's desktop displaying the widgets you can toggle on or off via its Settings window. The Settings can be opened by clicking the cogwheel button at the end of the bar and going to the Widgets tab.

From the Settings window, you can also customize snwe's looks by switching between four different themes bundled by default, and two color schemes.

Unfortunately, at the moment, snwe does not come with support for multi-monitor setups seeing that as much as we wanted to move it to another monitor, the app kept snapping back on the primary display.

Also, we encountered another drawback while browsing through the Settings tabs: content from a previously accessed tab might be displayed within the currently active tab, an infrequent occurrence that can make the Settings window unusable at times.

Moreover, as much as we tried to, we weren't able to make the music player widget to work, although we switched between iTunes and Spotify (two of the tree supported music players), restarting the app every time to make sure that the new settings were applied.

It would be nice to have the Time/Date, WiFi, Volume, and Battery widgets open their corresponding preference panes for quick access to the system preferences when you need to alter the settings.

Taking everything into consideration, although snwe is a breath of fresh air for a desktop environment dominated on most Macs by Apple's menu bar and dock combo, it still has a long journey until it will be able to adequately replace them.

snwe showed a lot of promise, and we're sure that it can become a highly dependable app launcher and system monitoring tool for Mac users, as soon as it goes beyond its current early development stage, the still missing features, and addressed the bugs that might put you off.