i’d prefer to NOT have a menu bar icon (note on mac it is not called a task bar)
is there a way to shut off the menu bar icon?
It is not officially supported, mostly to avoid people installing ActivityWatch on other people’s computer without them realizing it’s installed to track them.
It is possible to do though, but not easy. What the aw-qt application does (which displays the menu) is to keep track of the programs aw-server, aw-watcher-afk and aw-watcher-window. You can start those without the tray icon, but they are not an standard .app but just executable files. And if any of them crashes you need to keep track of them yourself and restart them if necessary.