SaneBar is now free and open source (MIT) — and why it's being sunset
Greetings from the craggy depths of Sane Mountain. Mr. Sane here with some good news and some bad news.
To quote The Clash: I fought the law, and the law won.
Apple's next version of macOS, macOS 27 "Golden Gate," fundamentally rebuilds how the menu bar works, and it is already breaking SaneBar and every other menu bar manager in the beta. The new architecture is openly hostile to apps like ours. In Apple's own developer forums, one of their framework engineers put it plainly: "Local event monitors are no longer the recommended way of scanning for events on status items." In practice, right-click menus stop responding, click behavior changes, and dragging an item in the menu bar now triggers Mission Control instead of moving it. That last one is the whole ballgame for an app like SaneBar.
Straight from the source:
- Apple engineer + developer reports: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/832823
- macOS 27 release notes: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-notes/macos-27-release-notes
- The broader AppKit discussion: https://developer.apple.com/forums/forums/topics/ui-frameworks-topic/ui-frameworks-topic-appkit
The reason some long-standing issues can't be fixed isn't for lack of trying — Apple has moved the ground out from under us.
The good news: as of today, SaneBar is completely free and MIT licensed — fully open source, every feature unlocked, no strings attached. Use it, fork it, modify it, build on it, even ship your own version. If you find a fix for something that's been bugging you, open a pull request and I'll gladly merge it in.
This isn't only me. Every menu bar manager is hitting the same wall, because Apple built it. It's like Kenny Rogers in The Gambler: you have to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away, and know when to run. I'm not running — I fully intend to keep building credible, privacy-focused software for the Mac. But on SaneBar, I have to know when to fold them.
If you want to see what else I'm building, the rest of my apps live at https://saneapps.com. They're actively maintained, none of them are on Apple's chopping block, and checking them out (and supporting them) is what keeps the next ones coming.
Thank you to everyone who filed issues, sent fixes, and used it. It meant a great deal.
I'll leave you with my favorite words, from the apostle Paul in 2 Timothy 4:7: I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.
Whatever you're working on, keep the faith.
— Mr. Sane
P.S. If you'd like to support the software I make, my GitHub sponsor page is here and it means more than you know: https://github.com/sponsors/MrSaneApps