A Dark Menu Bar for OS/X

This is a little app that turns your menu bar black. It is derived from an application called Nocturne, by Blacktree, except that this version is focused primarily on the menu bar and not on the overall screen tinting that was present in Nocturne.

It also has improved behavior in the presence of Lion full-screen applications.

How it works

An overlay window is created that sits in front of the menu bar and applies a filters to change the menubar color.

By default it uses a hue filter to change the color, but there is a hidden preference that can be used to change this to a saturation filter in case you don't like how the colors are manipulated by the hue filter.

Preferences

There is no preference GUI (pull requests to add this are welcome!) but you can set the following preferences via the command line:

Enable/Disable Menu Bar Item

By default, MenuBarFilter provides a menu item that allows you to quit it. You can turn this off by running the following command and then restarting MenuBarFilter:

defaults write org.wezfurlong.MenuBarFilter enableMenu NO

Enable/Disable Hue Filter

By default, MenuBarFilter uses a Hue filter to manipulate the color of the menu bar. This may cause some menu bar apps to display with strange colors (particularly those that use colored icons or graphs in the menu bar). If you don't like this, you can disable the hue filter and instead use a saturation filter to reduce the saturation, brightness and contrast of the menu bar.

You will need to restart MenuBarFilter for this to take effect:

defaults write org.wezfurlong.MenuBarFilter useHue NO

License

This software is distributed under the terms of the Apache License 2.0

• Copyright 2005 Blacktree
• Copyright 2011 eece
• Copyright 2012 Wez Furlong