All tests run on an 8-year-old MacBook Air.

All results from shipping 7 Mac apps as a solo developer. No sponsored opinion.

Menubar apps look simple from the outside. A tray icon, a popover, done.

The actual implementation has enough edge cases that I wish someone had written this before I started.

The basic setup

Tauri v2 has first-class tray icon support. The fundamentals:

rust

use tauri::{

tray::{TrayIconBuilder, TrayIconEvent},

Manager,

};

TrayIconBuilder::new()

.icon(app.default_window_icon().unwrap().clone())

.on_tray_icon_event(|tray, event| {

if let TrayIconEvent::Click { .. } = event {

// toggle window

}

})

.build(app)?;

Hide from Dock and App Switcher

A menubar app shouldn't appear in the Dock or Cmd+Tab switcher. Set this in Info.plist:

xml

LSUIElement

Or in tauri.conf.json:

json

{

"bundle": {

"macOS": {

"infoPlist": {

"LSUIElement": true

}

}

}

}

Without this, users will be confused why a menubar app appears in the Dock.…