Free · Open source · macOS 14+

Pull requests and issues in your menu bar.

The contributions people send to your repositories — without the comment threads, the CI results and the rest of the notification inbox.

Download for macOS

Signed and notarized by Apple — opens without a Gatekeeper warning.

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Only the part that needs you

Four decisions that keep the list short enough to actually read.

Other people's work only

Pull requests and issues other people opened on your repositories, plus PRs waiting on your review. Your own drafts and threads you merely subscribed to never appear.

A noisy repo folds away

More than three open items in one repository and they collapse into a single row with a submenu. The instinct otherwise is to mute the repo entirely — and then miss the one real contribution it gets.

Unread is a colour, not a badge

New items are green, seen ones fade to grey. Clicking a row opens it and marks it seen in the same motion — there is nothing extra to dismiss.

It tells you when it fails

No connection, expired session, rate limit — each becomes a visible row. An empty list would be the worst outcome: you'd read "couldn't check" as "nothing waiting".

One request, one API point

A single GraphQL query per refresh covers three searches, your profile and the quota status. At the default five-minute interval that is 12 points an hour — 0.24% of GitHub's 5,000. 

is:pr    is:open user:@me -author:@me     → Pull Requests
is:issue is:open user:@me -author:@me     → Issues
is:pr    is:open review-requested:@me     → Review Requested

No account to create

GHBar reads your token from gh auth token. There is no sign-up, no password to hand over and no server in the middle.

Nothing leaves your Mac

Filtering, grouping and the record of what you've seen all happen locally. No telemetry, no analytics, no network listener of its own.

Open source

MIT licensed. Read the query it sends, the filter it applies and the file it writes — all of it is in the repository.

Install

Homebrew

brew install --cask cobanov/tap/ghbar

Direct download

Unzip and drag GHBar.app into Applications.

Latest release

Requirements

  • macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer
  • GitHub CLI (gh), signed in — brew install gh && gh auth login

GHBar borrows the token gh already holds, so there is no second sign-in. Built-in sign-in without gh is coming in a later release.