Here’s a quick little Mac tip; a simple one but also one I didn’t know about until recently – how to move or remove Menu Bar items. The Menu Bar is that slim, semi-transparent bar that spans the width of your screen and sits at the very top of it. Menu Bar items include the File through Help menus and a series of icons for various other built-in and third party features.
The built-in Menu Bar icons include ones for Airport WiFi, Bluetooth, speaker volume, battery status indicator, and so on. Third party menu icons will vary (or possible not even be present) depending on which third party apps you have installed.
I recently ran into an issue where in certain apps (those that have more text menu items) I couldn’t see all of the third party menu bar icons, as there just wasn’t enough space.
So I wanted to move icons around or get rid of some in order to see an essential one within all apps.
The good news is that moving or removing any of the built-in menu bar icons is easy. Here’s how:
Just hold down the Command key while clicking on a menu bar icon and drag the icon. Drag left or right to move it around, or down to remove it from the menu bar.
The not-so-good news is that there is no easy way (that I have been able to discover) to do the same with icons for third party apps. Some may have a preference setting that lets you choose to show their icon or not, but not all as far as I can tell. This makes things awkward if you have a number of third party app icons in the menu bar.
If any of you know a clever / better way to deal with third party icons, please share in the comments.
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