Appearance

Light and dark

Appearance pins the bar to Light or Dark instead of following the system — a light menu bar with a dark strip beneath it, or the reverse.

It is an NSAppearance on the panel, so the material, the labels, the icons and the hover label all move together. That matters for the next section: setting a colour and leaving the text to the system is how you get black on black.

Material and custom colour

Material ▸ Custom Colour replaces the blur with a flat colour and an opacity of your choosing.

The two are exclusive on purpose. A colour drawn over a material is neither one nor the other: pick 80% black and you would get 80% black over a blur of the desktop, which is darker than you asked for and moves when the wallpaper does.

Appearance still decides whether the labels are drawn light or dark, so set it to match the colour you picked.

Custom icons

Icons come from a folder, not a picker. Open Settings ▸ Behaviour ▸ Custom Icons Folder… and drop an image in, named after the cell it replaces:

com.apple.Safari.png      an app, by its bundle identifier
trash.png                 the Trash
apps-menu.png             the Apps Menu button

• Capitals do not matter.
• PNG, ICNS, TIFF, JPEG, HEIC, PDF and SVG all work. A key with more than one file takes the first of those in that order.
• The folder is watched, so changes show up straight away, and deleting a file puts the real icon back.
• A file that is not a readable image is ignored rather than leaving a blank cell, so a stray note in the folder does no harm.

To find an application’s identifier:

osascript -e 'id of app "Safari"'

Pinned folders and files are not listed there, because a path is not a filename. They do not need to be: Finder’s own Get Info ▸ paste an icon already overrides those, and the bar draws what Finder reports.

Renaming a cell

Right-click any cell and choose Rename. It changes the label on the bar and the hover title, and it is stored with the item, so it survives a restart. Empty the field to go back to the real name, or use Reset Name.

Two details:

• Renaming an application that is not pinned pins it, in the place it already occupies. A name that disappeared when the app quit would not be worth typing.
• Window buttons have no Rename. The name belongs to the application, and those cells are showing a window’s title.

Padding

Settings ▸ Appearance controls the padding around and between cells. It is independent of the designs — picking one leaves your padding as you had it.