10 Ways To Clean Up Your Mac Menu Bar

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can cleanup your Mac's Menu Bar. 

So the Menu Bar on your Mac can get quite crowded with icons on the right. Here are some ways that you can clean that up. You can see here I've got a lot of items here in my Menu Bar. Now if you've got a MacBook then you've got a notch at the top center of your screen and some of these may not even be visible because you've got too many items here and they disappear underneath the notch. So it's important that you clean it up not just to make it look less cluttered but also so you can access the things you want. One way to do that is to go into System Settings and then look for Menu Bar here on the left. Then you have a variety of different checkboxes. You can use this to survey what you've got here in the Menu Bar and then remove or add something to it. 

It's the most straight forward way to control what's in your Menu Bar. Plus you get options like whether or not items are always shown or only shown when active. For instance, here I've got Now Playing. It's only shown when active as opposed to always being shown even when I'm not playing any music. 

Now you don't have to go to System Settings to remove items from your Menu Bar. You can Drag them out. The trick is to hold down the Command Key. Then click and drag down. Drag far enough down until you see the word Remove appear above the icon. Then release and then the item will be removed from the Menu Bar. 

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But another thing you can do by Command dragging is to reorder items. So you can move items left or right by holding the Command Key down and dragging them and placing them there. Since items to the left may be hidden underneath the MacBook notch, or even if you don't have a MacBook, it may get hidden if you have too many menus on the left. You want to put your most important items on the right and the ones that you need the least on the left. So, for instance, you may want to leave the Weather here on the left but if you find you always need to control the Volume you may want to drag that over to the right so it is less likely to disappear under the notch or other menus. 

But you don't have to completely get rid of items from the Menu Bar if things are cluttered. You can put them in Control Center. Control Center and the Menu Bar work together. You can drag items from the Menu Bar. All you need to do is click Edit Controls. Now in addition to being able to Add controls to your Control Center here or remove them or move them around you can also drag them from the Menu Bar. So I can drag this Dark Mode button here from the Menu Bar into Control Center. Putting it here in Control Center to save space and declutters my Menu Bar and I still can access it from the Menu Bar by simply going to Control Center and finding the button there. 

If Control Center is getting too crowded note you can have multiple Control Centers. So I can go to Edit Controls here. There's a Plus Button in the Menu Bar. I can click that and it will add another Control Center. I can even set an appropriate icon for it if I like and I can move it over to wherever I want. I'll place it right here and I can put new items from the Menu Bar into this Control Center. Then I've got multiple Control Centers that I can select from. So I can really organize my Menu Bar button under one or more Control Centers, like this. 

Now before Apple added the ability to move Menu Bar items to Control Center and have multiple Control Centers there were a lot of third party apps that basically did the same thing. But now you can do it with just native macOS functionality. 

Now one of the biggest items in the Menu Bar is the Clock at the top right. You can't get rid of it because it is the button that controls whether or not Notification Center with the Widgets comes out of the right side of the screen. But you can shrink this down and customize it. Go back into System Settings and then go to Menu Bar again. Then you'll see Clock and Clock Options. You can decide exactly what shows up there. So you can remove things that you don't think you need. Even convert it to just a small single icon analog clock, like that, to save the most space. 

Now some items have multiple modes, some of which take up less space. For instance this item here is Fast User Switching, something I use all the time. It takes up a lot of space here because it shows the name of the current User which could be useful. But you can also go inside of System Settings Menu Bar and change it so it instead of showing the full name it shows a shorter account name or just a small icon, like that. On a MacBook you can also change how the Battery Icon looks showing you more or less information. A lot of third party apps that put an icon in the Menu Bar also have settings that changes how that icon looks or when it appears. In fact here in System Settings if you scroll further down you'll see Allow In Menu Bar, and it will show you all these third party apps here. A lot of these will only show the icon in the Menu Bar when the app is active or when it is doing something in particular. You could switch it Off here to take it out of the Menu Bar permanently but it is best to go into the App itself to see what options are available there as well. 

Some of the items in the Menu Bar you can completely get rid of and use the Keyboard Shortcuts for those instead of the buttons. For instance, for Spotlight or for Siri you can completely rely on the Keyboard instead. In System Settings go to Keyboard here at the bottom and then go to Keyboard Shortcuts. Then for Spotlight you'll see you've got a Keyboard Shortcut, Command Space, and you can even customize it. Then up in Apple Intelligence & Siri you've got a Keyboard Shortcut settings for Siri as well. You can set it to the Globe or fn key and S, pressing the Command Key twice, or customize it to whatever you want. Then you can go to the Menu Bar here and turn Off Siri and turn Off Spotlight to save that space. 

Now if you don't like how the Menu Bar is kind of transparent over the background you have control of that. This is also in the Menu Bar settings here and you can turn On, Show Menu Bar Background, to put a background behind it like this. It will still be tinted according to what's underneath it. But you can go into Accessibility and then Display and then turn On, Reduce Transparency. Then that gets rid of the tinting here. 

Now here's once advanced tip. You can actually reduce the spacing between the items in the Menu Bar. You want to use this command, typed exactly like this, capitalization counts and it will reduce the amount of spacing from 10 pixels to, in this case, 2 pixels. You need to restart the Menu Bar using killalll ControlCenter, for it to take effect. Watch how it changes. You can try going all the way down to zero or maybe more than 10 if you would like more spacing. To reset it to the default, use this command here and again restart Control Center and it will go back to how it was. 

So if you find your Menu Bar is a little too cluttered hopefully some of these techniques will help. Thanks for watching.