MenuBarFolder
One menu bar, two kinds of content — your folders and your browser bookmarks.
DMG · macOS 13+ · v1.2.0 · signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple · MIT, open source.
Install: open the DMG and drag MenuBarFolder to Applications, then launch it and enable a Smart Menu or pin a folder. Provided “as is”, without warranty — see terms.
MenuBarFolder is a universal menu-bar viewer for two kinds of content: the files on your disk and the bookmarks in your browsers — both turned into native menus, a tap away from anywhere on screen. Same idea, two sources.
We all have that folder — Downloads, Screenshots, the desktop graveyard of “I'll sort this later.” You open it dozens of times a day, and every time it's the same ritual: find a Finder window, click around, sigh. MenuBarFolder turns that into a single click: pin any folder — or several — to your menu bar, and its contents are always a tap away. Your browser bookmarks get the same treatment — full bookmark trees with favicons, right in the menu bar — and ready-made Smart Menus make it useful on day one. Menus, not a productivity suite.
What it does
- Smart Menus, useful on day one — enable ready-made menus in one click: Downloads and Desktop (newest first), Screenshots (your latest grabs, detected automatically), and Recents (newest files across Downloads, Desktop, Documents, and screenshots).
- Browser bookmarks, finally useful again — pin a Chrome / Brave / Edge / Vivaldi profile, or Safari, and browse its bookmark tree from the menu bar, with favicons. (Safari needs Full Disk Access.) Clicking opens it in that browser; Option-click for actions — copy URL, share, or show a QR code to open the link on your phone. Multiple profiles get distinct badges. Bookmarks are read-only — we never write to a browser's bookmark file.
- Pins folders to the menu bar — each becomes its own icon, a folder glyph wearing the folder's first two letters like a name tag (Ap for Applications, Do for Downloads).
- Click a file, it opens — just like a Finder double-click. Subfolders unfold into nested submenus, as deep as you need. Option-click a file for actions — open, reveal, copy path, share, rename, or move to Trash; a subtle hint sits at the bottom of each menu. (Folders are navigation only.)
- Tagged files stand out — a Finder colour label shows as a coloured dot in the menu. If you marked it, it matters.
- Handles huge folders — 40,000 photos? It reads in the background (no beachball), caches the result, shows the first 250 and folds the rest into a single “open in Finder” line.
- Sorts how you like — by name, date added, date modified or size; folders on top or all mixed.
- Starts at login (optional), and remembers everything across reboots — set it once, forget it.
Private by design
- Reads only the folders and bookmark files you choose, locally, to build the menus. It does not read browser history, tabs, cookies, passwords, or sessions.
Quiet by design
- No Dock icon, no window clutter — one quiet process runs the whole show, however many folders you pin.
- Seed folders from the command line too: MenuBarFolder /Applications ~/Pictures ~/Downloads.
Small and a little playful, but it earns its place in the menu bar every day. Source on GitHub.