Thaw

Thaw is a free macOS app that manages the icons in your Mac's menu bar, the strip of icons that lives in the top-right corner of the screen. Its main job is letting you hide and show those icons on demand, which is useful when the menu bar gets crowded with app icons and there is not enough space to display them all. The app requires macOS 26 or later.

Thaw is a fork of an earlier app called Ice, created by Jordan Baird. When Ice went inactive, the Thaw project picked up the code to keep it maintained, fix bugs, and make sure it continues to work on newer versions of macOS. The goal is also to finish features that were planned for Ice but never shipped.

You can install Thaw by downloading a zip file from the releases page and dragging it to your Applications folder, or by using Homebrew, a popular Mac package manager, with the command "brew install thaw". A separate beta channel is available for users who want to try newer features before they are in the stable release.

The app is translated into more than a dozen languages, including German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Portuguese (Brazil), and several others. Translations are managed through Crowdin, a collaborative translation platform, so community members can contribute.

The project has a Discord server for support and discussion, and contributions are accepted for both translations and code. The README is focused on installation and translation coverage, and does not detail every specific feature the app includes beyond the core menu bar management function.