A menu bar app for MacBooks with a notch
Pin back what the notch hides.
When there are more menu bar icons than fit beside the notch, macOS quietly hides the rest. Hairpin notices, and keeps them in a small hairpin at the left end of your icons. Hover or click it, and they drop down in a row.
How it behaves
Small, and out of the way until you need it.
- Hover or click
- Rest the pointer on the hairpin for half a second and the row opens; move away and it closes. Click it and the row stays until you click elsewhere, click the hairpin again or press Escape.
- Only there when needed
- With nothing hidden, there is no hairpin. It appears the moment macOS runs out of room.
- Keeps up
- It follows along as you switch apps, long app menus included, as icons come and go, and as the menu bar hides itself or goes full screen.
- Looks right
- Icons keep their menu bar order. With Screen Recording they look just as they do in the menu bar, in a Liquid Glass row on macOS 26.
Permissions and privacy
It reads the menu bar, and nothing else.
Hairpin makes no network connections, doesn't log keystrokes and doesn't read app windows.
Accessibility lets it read other apps' menu bar icons and click them for you. Screen Recording is optional: with it, Hairpin captures only the menu bar strip to cut out icon shapes and reads the names of menu bar item windows; the shapes stay in memory. Without it, or for icons never shown, the row uses the app's own icon. Apple's items and apps without an icon show an initial in a rounded square.
Hairpin · Care label
- Accessibility
- Required
- Reads and clicks menu bar icons
- Screen Recording
- Optional
- macOS 14+, menu bar strip only
- Network
- None
- Keystrokes
- Never logged
- App window contents
- Never read
Install
Three steps, one permission.
Download Hairpin.dmg, open it and drag Hairpin onto Applications.
Open Hairpin. It's signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens without a warning.
Turn on Accessibility for Hairpin when it asks.
macOS 13 or later on Apple silicon · real icon looks need macOS 14 · the Liquid Glass row needs macOS 26
Limitations
What to expect.
- Hairpin doesn't move icons; it clicks the real one. Some apps open their menu by the notch, where the icon was hidden, and a few ignore the click or open a window instead.
- An icon's look is captured while it's shown, so anything that changes, like unread counts or battery level, shows as it last looked.
- With several displays, only the notched one (or the primary one) counts.