Your Mac’s menu bar can hold a ton of useful utilities. From managing your calendar to adding a virtual sticky note, there’s a great menu bar tool for just about everything. I recently discovered another handy app called Folder Peek, which lets you put any folder on your Mac in the menu bar. There are a bunch of different uses for this, but my favorite is using it as an app launcher.

Once you’ve installed Folder Peek on your Mac (just click “Get” while viewing it in the App Store), choose which folder you’d like to add to your menu bar. Here’s a neat trick: if you choose the Applications folder, clicking on it will reveal all of the apps installed on your Mac, which you can then click again to launch. This is great for cleaning up your dock, and can also be faster than launching an app via Spotlight (or a better alternative).

However, it does take a bit of configuration to get the most out of this setup. To customize how your folder looks in the menu bar, click the Folder Peek icon and press Command-Shift-, (the last key is a comma). This will open a settings window. Choose an icon for your folder, give it a title, and then go to the Menu section. I like the Date Opened sort order and the icon size for large files. I also limit the maximum number of icons to 15. Feel free to play around with these options until you find something that works best for you.

Since you can add any folder to your menu bar, there’s a lot more you can do with this app. If you add a folder with photos in it, you can quickly preview them using Folder Peek. I found this process to be faster than using the spacebar to preview photos and the arrow keys to scroll through them, at least on my M1 MacBook Air. Likewise, you can also preview text files and PDFs and see what’s inside various subfolders. With subfolders open in Folder Peek, press Shift to reveal more options, like Get Info or Copy Path.