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About this fork

This is an AI-native maintained continuation of jordanbaird/Ice. Upstream's last code commit was 2025-06-06 and the last stable release (0.11.12) shipped 2024-10-29 - before macOS Sequoia and Tahoe. This fork picks up the open community PRs that already exist upstream, ships them as proper releases, and layers AI integration (MCP server) on top.

Positioning vs sibling forks

Multiple maintained forks of Ice exist - that is healthy for the ecosystem.

  • stonerl/Thaw is the established maintenance fork: 6,000+ stars, active release cadence, focused purely on Tahoe stability. Choose Thaw if you want a drop-in Ice replacement without AI surface area.
  • Fire (this repo) is the AI-native fork. Differentiator: an embedded MCP server (Model Context Protocol) so Claude, Cursor, and Codex can read and (in fire.7+) modify the menu bar layout. Choose Fire if you want to experiment with AI-assisted menu bar management - and you don't mind being on the leading edge.
  • upstream jordanbaird/Ice remains the canonical project. Both Thaw and Fire honor that work and remain GPL-3.0. Bugs that exist upstream should be filed upstream first.

Fire is maintained by a non-developer running product / vision, with Claude (Anthropic's AI) as the implementation collaborator. That is the experiment: keeping useful software alive when the human-only maintainer cohort is not large enough to staff every project the community depends on. If experiments here produce something generally useful (e.g., the MCP integration layer), the intent is to send it upstream or to Thaw as a PR - same north star, different surface area.

Branch genealogy (why fire/main is based on upstream macos-26)

Upstream has four meaningful branches:

  • main - abandoned for code in June 2025. Last two commits are issue template edits. Does not work on macOS 26 Tahoe.
  • 0.12.0 - next-release prep: 37 commits of refactoring, full-screen search panel, utility window mask. Independent of Tahoe work.
  • macos-26 - Tahoe compatibility: HIDEventManager rename, screen capture rework, version bumps. 75 commits ahead of main. This is where the only Tahoe pre-release tag (0.11.13-dev.2, 2025-09-16) lives, and every open community PR that fixes a Tahoe bug is based here, not on main.
  • profiles - feature branch for layout profiles (issue #26). Based on 0.12.0. Incomplete.

macos-26 and 0.12.0 diverged early and were never merged together, so they are independent forks of upstream's history. Picking one as the base for fire/main is therefore a real choice, not a formality.

fire/main is based on macos-26. Reasons:

  1. The only Tahoe-capable build (0.11.13-dev.2) ships from here.
  2. Every Tahoe-related community PR was opened against this branch. Cherry-picking them onto main fails - the surrounding code has moved.
  3. The 37 commits in 0.12.0 are real value (search panel UX, several refactors) but can be merged into fire/main as a separate batch later; they are not blockers for shipping a Tahoe stable.
  4. main is only 2 commits ahead of macos-26, and both are issue template edits we will overwrite with our own templates anyway.

Local repo conventions

  • main mirrors jordanbaird/Ice:main; only fast-forwards from upstream. Kept around so we can diff against the abandoned line.
  • fire/main is the maintained fork, based on upstream/macos-26. All work goes here.
  • merge/pr-NNNN-short-description are per-PR working branches that get cherry-picked or merged into fire/main.

Remotes

origin    https://github.com/pdurlej/fire-from-ice         # the fork (push)
upstream  https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice     # original (read-only)

Phasing

  1. Tahoe stability. Cherry-pick the open community PRs that fix macOS 26 issues on top of the macos-26 baseline. Ship as 0.11.13-fire.1 under the existing com.jordanbaird.Ice bundle ID so current users upgrade in place with no migration.
  2. 0.12.0 merge. Pull in the 37 refactor/search-panel commits from upstream/0.12.0. Resolve conflicts against the macos-26 baseline. Ship as 0.12.0-fire.1.
  3. Feature merges. Per-display configuration (upstream #612), auto Ice Bar by screen width (#795), notch-aware auto-hide (#941), multimonitor single space fix (#667).
  4. Rebrand to Fire. New bundle ID, new icon, first-launch migration that copies UserDefaults and Keychain entries from the old com.jordanbaird.Ice domain. TCC permissions (Accessibility, Screen Recording) must be re-granted because TCC keys on bundle ID - this is a one-time UX cost documented in the migration flow.
  5. Original features for heavy users. Profiles for menu-bar layout (#26) - start from upstream/profiles if it is salvageable, otherwise from scratch. Trigger conditions (#62). Sensible defaults for new-icon placement (#6). Config export/import (#326). Investigation of the recurring "Layout settings is empty" class of bugs (#744, #891).

Attribution and license

All code remains under GPL-3.0, unchanged. Jordan Baird remains the original author and copyright holder. This fork is independent and unofficial - please do not file fork-specific issues on the upstream tracker.