Following months of playing whack-a-mole with bugs stemming from changes Apple made to the menu bar’s underlying structure in macOS Tahoe, the developers behind Bartender seem to have, at last, gotten things under control.
Last January, I wrote that after running into repeated compatibility issues between macOS Tahoe 26 and Bartender, I decided to give up on the app:
From random cursor hijacking and ghost clicks across the interface to reliability issues involving rearranging and hiding menu icons, from performance and memory issues to a constant reindexing of hidden and visible icons that would make the Mac’s menu bar go completely and intrusively bonkers from time to time, having Bartender 6 open meant working on a machine that would frequently behave completely uncontrollably.
And to be clear, once again, it is very obvious that Applause worked as fast as it could, and is still working as hard as it can to make the app work properly, given the changes introduced on macOS Tahoe 26.
But this week, after realizing that the cursor issues I had been facing for weeks (where hovers would simply stop registering, or the system would start clicking and dragging items as I moved the cursor across the trackpad) were also tied to Bartender being open, I finally gave up.
After publishing the piece, Bartender developer Applause reached out to me, explaining that they had just finally tracked down what was causing the cursor issues that had made me jump ship.
A few days later, they released Bartender version 6.4.1, with a new setting called Layout Mode.
With it, users can choose between On-Demand, which “arranges your bar when you ask–no interruptions,” or Live, which “auto-arranges when a change is detected but may briefly interrupt your mouse.”
As they explained, choosing On-Demand would fix the problem, ridding the system of ghost clicks, cursor hijacking, etc. Bartender would do a single layout pass, and that would be it.
If I’m being honest, I did feel tempted to try it right away, but I really meant it when I said I was fed up with the possibility of having to face either the same issues as before, or new issues that would interrupt my workflow. So I decided to sit it out.
Only, I didn’t. About two weeks ago, I caved. I installed the latest version of Bartender (6.4.2), and it worked!
I’ve used Bartender full-time since then (with On-Demand selected as my preferred Layout Mode setting), and haven’t had a single issue since.
So if you had also given up on Bartender at any point since the release of macOS Tahoe 26, it might be safe to give it one more shot. I’m certainly glad I did.
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