Changelog: MenuTidy and ActiveSpace

Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash

Most of what I do to these little menu-bar apps never earns a headline. A control that was hard to see. A feature someone asked for. A thing macOS quietly broke on a Tuesday. This is a roundup of the recent small stuff across two of them — MenuTidy and ActiveSpace — and the short stories behind each change, because the why is usually more interesting than the what.

MenuTidy learns to tidy itself

The itch had a name before it had a feature. You expand your menu bar to grab a hidden icon, you use it, and then… it just sits there, expanded, until you remember to click it shut. MenuTidy’s whole job is a tidy menu bar — and here it was leaving the mess out on the side.

Then someone opened an issue asking for exactly that: auto-collapse a few seconds after your pointer leaves the menu bar. (Thank you, fuzzy76.) I’d been quietly wanting it myself, so in it went.

It started life as a hidden setting — the sort you’d only find if you knew the incantation — while I lived with it for a while and made sure it felt helpful rather than fidgety. It did. So it’s now a proper, first-class setting: right-click the chevron, open Settings, and there’s an Auto-Collapse switch with a delay you can set anywhere from 0 to 999 seconds. Zero means “the instant I move away”; a few seconds means “give me a beat to change my mind.” The countdown resets if you move back up to the bar, so it only tidies once you’ve genuinely wandered off.

It’s off by default — nothing changes unless you decide you want it.

When Tahoe moved the furniture

MenuTidy has a feature for notched Macs called Reveal Hidden Icons: the menu-bar icons that get swallowed by the notch, gathered into a little panel you can click. fuzzy76 came back with a puzzle — clicking an icon in that panel did nothing. Except sometimes it did. First click: dead. Every click after: fine.

“Works on the second try” is the kind of bug that makes you distrust your own eyes. It turned out not to be my code at all — it was macOS 26, Tahoe. The trick MenuTidy uses to “click” a hidden icon is a little accessibility nudge, and on Tahoe the very first nudge to another app’s menu-bar icon comes back with a shrug — the line’s cold. The second one connects. So MenuTidy now warms the line: if the first nudge doesn’t take, it quietly tries again, and the click lands the first time, every time.

While I was in there, I tidied the panel itself. It used to flash a cached list and then redraw with the real one — which meant, for a moment, you couldn’t quite trust what you were looking at. Now it shows a brief spinner and then the real list, once, so what you see is always the finished article. Choosing Reveal again closes the panel; collapsing the bar closes it too.

ActiveSpace: which app am I about to land on?

ActiveSpace has a lovely trick — a commandtab that shows only the apps on your current Mission Control space, instead of every window across every desktop. It works beautifully. But the highlight marking which app you’d switch to was a pale, translucent thing, and on a bright wallpaper or under a bit of glare it all but vanished. You’d tab across the row and genuinely not be sure where you’d end up.

So the highlight grew up. It’s now a filled chip in your system accent colour, with a crisp outline and a soft shadow — the same visual language macOS uses for a selected thing everywhere else. It reads at a glance on any background, and it follows whatever accent colour you’ve chosen. No more squinting.

The theme, if there is one

None of these is a big feature. A switch, a retry, a brighter highlight. But this is most of what keeping software good actually is: listening when someone tells you what’s annoying them, noticing when the ground shifts under you, and refusing to let “you can just about live with it” be the finished state. Small, careful, and ideally invisible — right up until the moment you’d have missed it.

All shipping now, via the built-in updater or the download pages, whichever you prefer.