🚀 MountMate

February 5, 2026 · View on GitHub

A simple macOS menu bar app to manage your external drives.

MountMate Icon

⚡️ Quick Start

Install via Homebrew:

brew install mountmate

Or download the latest .dmg and drag MountMate.app into your Applications folder.

🧩 What is MountMate?

MountMate is a lightweight macOS menu bar utility that lets you mount and unmount external drives with a single click – no Terminal, no Disk Utility, no hassle.

Whether you're dealing with a noisy spinning HDD or want finer control over when your drives are active, MountMate gives you a clean, no-nonsense solution right from your menu bar.

🧠 Why I Built It

I have a 4TB external HDD plugged into my Mac mini 24/7. Since it's a spinning drive, macOS constantly spins it up – just for trivial things like opening Finder or running Spotlight. That meant:

  • Unwanted noise
  • System slowdowns
  • Wasted energy

I tried:

  • Disk Utility – too slow and clunky
  • Custom shell scripts – too technical
  • Existing third-party apps – too bloated or didn’t work right

So I built MountMate.

✅ Features

  • View all connected external drives
  • See which ones are mounted
  • Mount/unmount any drive with a click
  • Check available free space
  • Keyboard Shortcuts: Quick mount/unmount with ⌘⇧M and ⌘⇧U
  • Network Shares: Auto-mount SMB shares at login
  • Force Eject: Safely force eject drives that are in use
  • Runs quietly in the menu bar
  • Fully native – no Electron, no dependencies

✨ Why Use MountMate?

macOS automatically mounts drives when they’re plugged in – but gives you no easy way to remount them later unless you use Terminal or Disk Utility. MountMate is perfect for:

  • External HDDs you don’t always need
  • Drives used only for backup
  • Reducing wear and tear or noise
  • Improving system responsiveness

🔐 Private, Fast, and Safe

MountMate runs entirely offline, using native macOS APIs and command-line tools. It:

  • Does not track anything
  • Does not require connect to the internet
  • Does not access your files
  • Does not require root permissions

Just a clean utility that does one job well.

🖼️ Screenshots

Full Screenshot

🛠️ Installation

Manual Installation

  1. Download the latest .dmg release
  2. Open the .dmg file
  3. Drag MountMate.app into the Applications folder
  4. Eject the installer disk image
  5. Launch MountMate from Applications

Install via Homebrew

If you have Homebrew installed, you can install MountMate directly from this repository:

brew install mountmate

📫 Feedback & Contributions

MountMate was built to solve my personal workflow issue, but I’d love to improve it for others too. Feel free to open an issue or suggest improvements!

🤝 Support

If you found MountMate helpful, please consider supporting its development:

ko-fi