Welcome to the Lounge blog. This is where we'll share menu bar productivity tips, deep dives into how Lounge works under the hood, and honest comparisons against other menu bar managers like Bartender.
Why we built Lounge
Every Mac app wants a spot in your menu bar. Install a handful of utilities, background sync tools, and one-off menu bar apps, and you end up with a row of icons you can barely tell apart. MacBooks with a notch make the problem worse, because icons can end up hidden behind the camera housing entirely — clickable in theory, invisible in practice.
Lounge fixes both problems at once. It uses macOS's Accessibility APIs to hide and reveal menu bar icons on demand, and it's built specifically around the notch: hover near it and a panel appears showing everything, visible and hidden, laid out clearly. Sorting is a drag-and-drop motion, not a settings menu. If you want the full mechanics of how that works, see What Is Lounge?
# Toggle hidden menu bar items from anywhere
⌘ + Shift + L
What to expect from this blog
- Practical guides — step-by-step walkthroughs like decluttering your menu bar and getting started with Lounge
- Honest comparisons — feature-by-feature breakdowns against Bartender, Ice, and Hidden Bar, including where those tools are ahead of Lounge
- Agent workflows — for developers using AI coding tools, Lounge Pro can surface Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, and Aider notifications right in the hidden panel; the agent tutorials walk through setup for each
- Release notes and behind-the-scenes engineering notes — as Lounge's hide/reveal mechanism and clipboard history evolve
Where to start
If you're new to Lounge, the fastest path is the getting started guide — it covers installation, the Accessibility permission prompt, and your first sorted icon in under five minutes. Lounge is $3.99/year with a 7-day free trial, so you can download it and try the full feature set before paying anything.
More posts are on the way. If there's a topic you'd like covered, reach out on Twitter.