Tuck and macOS 27: where things stand

What changed in macOS 27

These points come from developer notes and issue reports published by other projects, included in the 4 October 2026 research snapshot. We have not verified them on our own hardware, so treat them as reports.

• Layout moved into a system process. Developer notes from the Ellipsis project’s investigation, measured on macOS 27.0 while Tuck’s own support is in development, say menu bar layout now lives in a system process called MenuBarAgent. The old trick of hiding items by making a status item very wide no longer pushes other items off screen.
• No window per status item. The Ellipsis layout notes say each display has one full-width menu bar window. Screen capture methods that relied on one window per item have nothing to capture.
• A built-in overflow button. When the status area runs short, the system collapses the leftmost items and draws a button labelled Show Hidden Menu Bar Items. It is not a hidden section, an Always-Hidden section or a layout editor.
• Per-app permission to appear. Apple documents Allow in the Menu Bar in macOS 26 Menu Bar settings too. This control is separate from an app’s own icon setting; it is not new evidence of Tuck support for the coming OS release.

Why existing hiding methods broke

Many managers hide icons by making one of their own status items very wide, which pushes the others off screen. Issue reports describe the result on macOS 27 betas: Ice stays expanded, and Hidden Bar stops hiding. See Ice issues 954 and 996. A report that lists one app’s failure is a report about one build. It is not a failure rate.

What is different about Tuck’s position

• Tuck is forked from Thaw. Thaw published 3.0.0-beta.1 on 2 October 2026 that is labelled macOS 27 only. That work is the reference point for Tuck’s own macOS 27 plan.
• We do not claim Thaw’s beta as a Tuck result, and we do not claim macOS 27 works in Tuck today.

Tuck’s plan

1. Finish and test macOS 27 support on real macOS 27 builds, on notched and external displays.
2. Publish a compatibility table in the changelog that names the macOS build, the Tuck version and what passed and failed.
3. Update this page and the download page on the day support ships.

If you are about to update macOS

• Write down or screenshot your current menu bar layout.
• Check the native options first: on macOS 26 you can choose which items show in System Settings and Command-drag to reorder.
• Keep your current manager installed until the replacement is tested on your Mac.