Native macOS utility · 2026

FreeBar

Available storage, without opening Finder or Disk Utility.

FreeBar keeps practically available storage visible in the macOS menu bar for the Mac and normally mounted local physical drives.

Download v0.1.0 View source

Version: FreeBar v0.1.0
Platform: macOS 13+ · Apple Silicon
Refresh: ≈ 5 seconds + events
License: MIT

FreeBar shown in the macOS menu bar with its real available-storage interface.

What it measures

The space macOS considers practically available.

FreeBar prefers Foundation’s volumeAvailableCapacityForImportantUsage and falls back to volumeAvailableCapacity. The result can include reclaimable space, so it may differ from the raw immediately-free value shown by tools such as df.

M / G / T
Decimal units: Mac
Primary volume: + drives
Local physical storage

Native behavior

Event-driven topology. Lightweight capacity refresh.

Mount, unmount, rename and wake events trigger rediscovery. Capacity updates run on a utility queue, refresh requests are coalesced and stale asynchronous work cannot update a restarted monitor.

No shell polling or recurring child processes.
Disk Arbitration and Foundation metadata filter physical local storage conservatively.
System helper volumes, DMGs, virtual filesystems and network shares are excluded.
The menu title is reassigned only when the resulting text actually changes.

Architecture

A small native pipeline from mounted volumes to one menu-bar line.

FreeBar uses only native macOS frameworks for discovery, capacity reads, menu-bar UI and Launch at Login.

macOS mount table
      │
      ▼
Disk Arbitration + Foundation metadata
      │
physical/local filter
      │
      ▼
 StorageReader
      │
available capacity
      │
      ▼
 StorageMonitor
 event refresh + ~5s timer
      │
      ▼
   NSStatusItem

Verified status

The hardening pass validated the core app behavior.

The documented verification covers warnings-as-errors builds, 10 XCTest tests, native bundle validation, automatic capacity refresh, manual Refresh, Launch at Login, reinstall/uninstall safety, virtual-volume exclusion, privacy and resource use.

10 / 0
XCTest / failures: 0.0%
Observed idle CPU: ≈ 42.5 MiB
Observed RSS: 0
Child processes

Privacy

Fully local and single-purpose.

FreeBar queries only filesystem and device metadata needed to identify mounted storage and report available capacity.

No telemetry, analytics, accounts or advertising.
No networking or update service.
No file scanning and no user-file contents are read.
Privacy manifest declares no collected data and no tracking.

Distribution

Install the compiled app from GitHub Releases.

The v0.1.0 release includes a ready-to-use macOS ZIP. Xcode, Swift, Homebrew and Command Line Tools are not required on the destination Mac.

Download v0.1.0

Download FreeBar-v0.1.0-macOS.zip.
Extract FreeBar.app.
Move FreeBar.app to Applications.
Open FreeBar; use its menu for Refresh, Launch at Login or Quit.

The current build is ad-hoc signed and is not yet Developer ID notarized. If Gatekeeper blocks the first launch, control-click the app, choose Open and confirm.

Scope

Conservative by design.

FreeBar considers normally mounted local physical storage only. The final hardening run did not re-test with an external physical drive attached; hardware-dependent external-drive, sleep/wake and older-macOS checks remain outside that final run. iPhone/iPad storage is not supported.

Storage you can use, kept visible and out of the way.

FreeBar v0.1.0 is available for macOS 13+ under the MIT License.

Download v0.1.0 View source