How To Customize App Window Toolbars On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how you can customize the Toolbars in the apps on your Mac. 

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So toolbars are those areas at the top of windows on your Mac. They usually have a collection of buttons and other controls. Sometimes they're useful. Sometimes not so much. But did you know that you can customize those to add more buttons and get rid of ones that you don't use. So let's look at the basics by starting in Safari. So I have a Safari window here and you can see there's a pretty modest toolbar at the top. There are Previous and Next Page buttons. There's a button to show the Sidebar. Of course the Address field and some buttons on the right as well. 

Now if I want to modify the toolbar you can start one or two ways. One is I can go to View and look for Customize Toolbar. In the case of Safari it's right there near the top. I could also Control click or two finger click on a trackpad right here in the toolbar in a blank area and you'll get the option to customize toolbar. Either way you end up with something that looks like this. Basically a collection of buttons and controls at the top and you can drag these into the toolbar. For instance if I wanted to add iCloud Tabs as a button here I could just drag this button and put it anywhere I want. I could put it anywhere in the toolbar. So I'm just going to stick it here. Then I could look for other things I want to add as well.

For instance I may want to put a History button here. I could also move things around. For instance if I want the Share button to move over to this side I could move it there if I want. I can continue to add things. I could add Spaces as well. So here's a Flexible Space and I could drag that in-between here. Then it will add space as it has room depending upon the size of your window and how many other controls there are.

Now notice everything is kind of jiggling there, kind of like it does in iOS when you want to move apps around. When I hit Done and it all stops and that's my toolbar now. That will be the toolbar for every window in Safari. I can make further changes by going into View, Customize Toolbar again. If I want to get rid of something simply drag it down and it will get rid of it off the toolbar there. In addition I can always revert to the Default by grabbing the set of defaults at the bottom. This is like one big control. I can click and drag it and if I move that up here it resets the entire thing. In every app where you can control the toolbar you always have a set of defaults at the bottom that you could use. 

So let's look here in another app. Here I am in the Mail app. If I look under View I have Customize Toolbar again but it's towards the bottom now. I select that and I have a ton of different controls. So every app is going to have a different set of buttons and other controls that you could add or remove from the toolbar. Sometimes you get options too. For instance I could select Icon Only, Icon and Text, or Text Only for the toolbar. You could see here there are definitely some useful things that you could put here in your Mail app depending upon how you use mail.

Now one thing you should know about the Mail app is there are actually two different types of windows. There is the regular Viewing window, this one, and the Composition windows. If I go to File, New Message, this is the Composition window. Notice how the toolbars are different. If I were to go to View, Customize Toolbar here I can customize the Composition window with some different things than I can customize the regular window with. So take a look at both.

One of the most useful places to customize the toolbar is in the Finder. That's because we're always looking at Finder windows to manage our Files and Folders. So if you go to View, there's Customize Toolbar. There are a bunch of different useful things that you can add. So, for instance, I could add an Info button. I could have a Delete button. There's a very useful Path button in here. If I add that to it then I could easily see the path to where it is I am and go to any level above. There are other ways to do that kind of thing but a button might be really useful. This control here, the Task button, has a ton of different functionality in it. That's there by default.

Now also notice that sometimes you get extra buttons depending upon what apps you have installed. I've got a button for Dropbox here. That's only because I have the Dropbox app installed. You could also do some other interesting things with the Finder as well. I could take another Finder window like this one and as long as I have this first window here in edit toolbar mode I can drag a folder and stick it in the toolbar. Then it's a shortcut to that folder. Now I can do that same thing with a file so I have a shortcut to that file. So now I've got this folder and I can quickly click on it to go to it. I can quickly click on this to open up that file. I can drag and drop a file into that folder there in the toolbar. So the Finder toolbar has some pretty interesting special features.

So of the most customizable toolbars belong to the iWorks apps, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. So here I can go to View, and Customize Toolbar all the way at the bottom, and you can see there are a ton. So many that I have to scroll through to see all of the different controls that I can add to the toolbar here. There are other ways to access all of these. In the Menu and through Keyboard shortcuts and such. But if there's some things that you use a lot then you may want to customize the toolbar. For instance the Toolbar as it is really is pretty good for word processing. But if you're doing a lot of page layout stuff, things like forward and backward and grouping and things like that, it could be really useful to have it there in the Toolbar.