10 Mac Menu Bar Tips

The menu bar is something you use every day in almost every mac app. Here are some shortcuts and productivity tips for using the mac menu bar.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today lets take a look at ten Mac Menu Bar tips.
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So Mac users use the Menu Bar everyday all day long. In this video I'm going to focus on the main part of the Menu Bar. The left side here that has all of the different menus with different commands and Menu Bar items. My first tip is about the general use of the Menu Bar. There's actually two ways to use it. You probably use one without thinking about the fact that there is another. 
One method is to click to select a menu item and then release the mouse or trackpad and then click again to select a command. So, for instance, I could go to View just  by clicking once and now I'm not holding down the mouse or trackpad anymore. I can navigate to what I want and click again to select the item. The other way to use it is to click and hold and continue to hold down the mouse or trackpad. Get to the item you want and then release. Neither way is the right way to use it. Some people prefer one or the other. 
Now you notice when you go to any menu here you've got keyboard shortcuts shown to the right. You could see them here with the special symbols that represent the different keys. This is the Command key. This is the Shift key. This is the Control key. Down here you can see the Option key. To improve your productivity what you want to do is every time you use the menu notice if there is a keyboard shortcut for that menu command. If this is something you use often instead of actually using the menu simply close the menu and instead use the keyboard shortcut. This takes more time, of course. But the idea is you're teaching yourself to use the keyboard shortcut rather than the menu. After doing that a few times you'll remember the keyboard shortcut. In the end the best way for you to operate is for the most common menu items to use the keyboard shortcut. For everything else, don't worry about the memorizing the shortcut, simply find it in the Menu Bar  the next time you need it.
When you look at a menu you don't see all of the commands that are available. If you hold down the Option key on your keyboard you'll notice that some menu commands change. You can release the Option key and see it change back. The keyboard shortcuts change with it. So for instance, here you could see that Get info, Command I, changes to Show Inspector, Option Command I, when you hold down the Option key. but if you don't hold down that Option key to checkout what's in that menu you'll never know that Show Inspector is even available as a Command.
Sometimes the change is more subtle. For instance here in the Apple menu if I hold down the Option key you'll see some of the menu items change slightly. Like, for instance, look at Restart here. Without the Option key down you could see it's Restart with three dots or ellipses after Restart. That means it's going to prompt me asking if it's okay to restart if I select this. But if I hold down the Option key the ellipses goes away and it just says Restart which means it won't prompt me. It will just instantly go into a restart. 
Sometimes menu items don't appear at all until you hold down the Option key. The most famous of those being right here in the Finder. If I look at the Go menu and then I hold down the Option key I'll see the Library folder up here. It wasn't even there before without the Option key. Then it appears if you hold it down. This allows me to go to my Library folder, which is normally hidden.
Now many Mac users kind of ignore the last menu item here, Help. You click on it and you get Search and some links to some documentation. You'd think searching just basically gives you more documentation. But actually it helps you find menu items. Any menu item here is going to show up when you search. So, for instance, note how there's Use Groups here under View and under Sort By you can Snap to Grid. Well, if we go into Help here and type Groups you can see that the first thing here is Menu Items. If I move my cursor over it you can see it shows me where Use Groups is located. This is particularly useful if you can't find a menu item. It's hidden down into a submenu. So you search for Snap I can see Snap to Grid is hidden down in View, Sort By, and then Snap to Grid. It's easier to find by going to the Help Menu and searching for Snap. I could actually select it here. I don't actually have to go to the menu there. So I"m both learning and getting a shortcut to that menu item.
You don't have to click on the Help menu to use it. The keyboard shortcut for the Help menu is Shift Command and then the Slash key. Which in other words is kind of like Command ? and that instantly goes to the Help menu and puts the cursor right there in the Search view. I can now type what I want. I can down arrow to get to that item and hit Return to select that. As a matter of fact using Shift Command Slash is another way to access the Menu Bar by the keyboard. So I can do that. Now you see the Help menu selected and I can start typing. But I can also use the left arrow to move through the different menu items and the down arrow to go in. Then Return or space to select an item. By default you can also use Control and F2 to access the Menu Bar. You could see that instead of selecting the Help menu it selects the Apple menu. Now I can use arrow keys to move right and left and then down to select something. By my experience Control F2 sometimes doesn't work whereas Shift Command Slash always works.
Now if there is a menu item that doesn't have a keyboard shortcut you can assign one to it. Here under View you can see Clean Up doesn't have a keyboard shortcut. Let's say that's something that you use a lot and you want a keyboard shortcut for it. You can go to System Preferences and then to Keyboard. Then go to Shortcuts. You can go to Add Shortcuts and hit the Plus button to add a shortcut for any menu. So the key is to type in the exact menu title. Don't worry about the menu itself. Worry about the exact menu item. That was View, Clean Up. Don't worry about the View part. It's just Clean Up that we need to specify. So here we'll type Clean Up. It has to be exactly that menu name. Now we can select what Application. Sometimes you want to do it for All Applications if it's a common menu item. In this case this is something specific to the Finder so we'll choose Finder and we'll choose a keyboard shortcut. Let's do Option Shift Command U and Add it. Now when I'm in the Finder here and I go to View I can see Clean Up has Option Shift Command U as the keyboard shortcut. If I want to get rid of that I can just look here in the App Shortcut's List and I should find it there. I can select it and change it. I can Edit the name if I made a mistake and I could also hit the Minus button here to get rid of it.
Now let's look at some other System Preferences that effect the Menu Bar. If you go into System Preferences, General there's an option here for Automatically hide and show the menu bar. If you turn that on the Menu Bar disappears at the top. It will reappear if you move your cursor up there. It gives you a little bit more space on your Mac screen. Also notice at the bottom here there's a Recent Items number. You can set the number of recent items that you find here under Apple menu Recent Items. This will show you things like recent applications, recent documents, and other things. If you'd rather only have five recents items of maybe 15 or 50 you can change that. Here's a bonus tip: if you're in this menu and you hold the Command key down it changes from actually running the app or opening the document to showing you where it is. So if I wanted to see where a particular item was I just hold down the Command key, select it, and it will open that up in the Finder, just showing me the file, not opening it up.
Another System Preference you may want to checkout is under Accessibility. You go to Display and there's Reduce Transparency. The Menu Bar itself will seems to change color a little bit. It's actually revealing what's behind it on the screen. So in this case part of this desktop image. Turn Off Reduce Transparency and now the Menu Bar becomes completely opaque.
Now my last tip involves Full Screen Windows. Whenever you go Full Screen the Menu Bar goes away. A lot of people don't even realize they are doing this and hit this green button here thinking I just want the window to be as big as possible. But if you click it you go into full screen mode and the Menu Bar is gone. It's still there if you move your cursor all the way up to the top. It will drop down. But people don't realize that they are now in full screen mode. They will simply use the app for awhile, click the green button and it seems like the Menu Bar comes back. But what actually happens there is they are switching the window to full screen mode which means full screen. So the Menu Bar isn't going to be in the way. If your goal is to actually have the window to be as large as possible and still have the Menu Bar there what you want to do is expand the window to full size by grabbing the corners and dragging. If you want a shortcut for that all you need to do is hold the Option key down and double click on any one of the four corners of a window. That will expand all four corners to fit the window perfectly and will keep the Menu Bar there. You're still in window mode, you can see that's still a window there in that full screen. But it is a way to have it as large as possible and keep the Menu Bar on the screen at the same time.

Comments: 13 Responses to “10 Mac Menu Bar Tips”

3 years ago

Gary: Regarding keyboard shortcuts for menus, is there a way to create a shortcut for a submenu ? Apparently it used to work with -> between the menu title and the submenu title with no spaces, but it's not working in Catalina. Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

BB: You just need the name of the menu item. It doesn't matter how far down it is. Using -> or something like it was never the method. See https://macmost.com/create-your-own-custom-mac-keyboard-shortcuts.html

Thanks, Gary. Inputting the exact name of the menu item works, but apparently not in every app. The shortcut I created to decrease quotes in email replies (Decrease) works in Apple Mail but while it shows up alongside the menu item Decrease in Spark mail, all it does it give a system sound. Any thoughts?

BB: If you get a beep, then it sounds like maybe the menu item isn't active? Is it grayed out at that moment? Could also be that Spark is using that keyboard combo for something else.

Gary: It's not grayed out, and I tried a variety of other keyboard combos to no avail. I'll keep trying and post back if I get it working. Thanks for helping me think this through.

BB: Could be a bug in that app.

Alan Uren

An even better shortcut to fully expand a window is to double click on the tool bar area of the window.
Double click again and the window returns to original size.

Alan: That actually does something different. It will expand the window to the largest size that the app thinks the window needs. That's not often the same as the maximum size -- from edge to edge.

Jasper Robinson

All this time I thought that the Menu-item ellipses were just a quirky flourish!

When the Fn+2 Menu shortcut fails, you can get it back by using another function shortcut (e.g., Fn + 3/Dock) then trying for the menu again. It’s been like this for years and doesn’t seem to affect the other Fn shortcuts.

Carmen

Gary, I love all your tips, but I am confused about pinning a webpage and just keeping it open. Is there a difference in memory consumption?

Carmen: Memory consumption? I don't see how it would make a difference there.

Oscar

2 years ago

Hi Gary,
How might I most quickly navigate to a menu heading which is not itself an item but displays a list of items. Specifically in Mail I want to quickly open the Move To list under Messages, but a shortcut can't be made to this as it is not a final item itself...My workflow is I have to move many messages quickly to a wide variety of mailboxes for work currently I do this by shortcut to the menubar -> spell the name and pressenter to quickly navigate. Appreciate your thoughts - Thank you!

Oscar: I don't know of a quicker way than what you are currently doing. But why not use the toolbar "Move To" button instead? Or just drag and drop to the left sidebar?

Comments Closed.

10 Mac Menu Bar Tips

Comments: 13 Responses to “10 Mac Menu Bar Tips”

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