The Guide To Using Mac Status Menu Icons

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at using Menu Bar icons, also called Status Menus, on your Mac.

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So here at the top left corner of your Mac screen you'll see the Menu Bar icons which Apple officially calls Status Menus. These are little icons on the right side of your menu bar that perform a variety of functions. So whether you call them Menu Bar icons or Status Menus they are the items that appear at the top right corner of your Menu Bar. Typically they will be menus. You can click on one, like for instance I can click on Time Machine here, and it brings up a menu just like the menus here on the left side of the screen. But that's not always the case . For instance clicking on Spotlight will bring up the Spotlight menu. Clicking on Siri will activate Siri and clicking on Notifications will bring up the Notification Center. So they can bring up menus but they don't have to.

Now the icons will not change according to which app you're running. So the icons stay the same. They don't change for which app you're seeing. However some apps you use may actually launch a process that brings a menu bar icon into view. For instance when I use the Screen Recording software it brings this icon here into the menu bar. It's a separate process that's running. But it's not typical. Usually the menu bar icons will stay the same. They don't change like the left side of the menu bar when you switch apps.

Now you have the full control to rearrange the items here. For instance if I wanted the Bluetooth icon to be to the left of the Time Machine icon I can hold the Command key down, click and then drag that icon to a new position. It doesn't work for Notification Center. That one always has to be at the top right corner. But all the other icons I can drag to wherever I want. Now you can also get rid of some of these. If you were to Command drag, instead of dragging to the left or right drag down you can see eventually you'll get a little x circle there. If I were to release there the Status Menu is gone from the Menu bar. There are some you can't get rid of. For instance Spotlight here I cannot move down to remove it. It always has to be there. 

Now how do you add them? Well there are various different ways to add these. A lot of them could be added in System Preferences. If you go to System Preferences and you go to a specific section like Bluetooth you'll see an option for Show Bluetooth in menu bar. You select that and that is what puts that there. You could look throughout the rest of System Preference for others. For instance under Sound you can add an icon for volume there. In Keyboard there are actually two. One is found if you look under Keyboard Preferences. You could show keyboard  and emoji viewers in menu bar and you could see it appears here. But you could also go to Input Sources and there's one for Show input menu. So if I were to uncheck this one but leave this one checked you could see here I get a little American flag because I've chosen the US keyboard. If I were to add more keyboards here I could easily switch between them using this Status Menu.

Sometimes third party apps like for instance I have Backblaze installed here, they will also have the ability to add a menu bar icon here. You could see there's that option and it adds it to the menu bar. But other times apps won't appear here in System Preferences. But if you run the app and go into Preferences for that app it will have an option to add a menu bar icon here. Most apps don't have that. But a few, especially ones that are kind of like system extensions will, sometimes, have a Status Menu you can add.

Now one trick here is that sometimes there are hidden items in these Status Menu. So, for instance, if I were to click on the Speaker icon here you see I get to choose an output device. However if I hold the Option key down and click the exact same icon, I get a slightly different menu that includes Input device as well. You can see for Bluetooth I get some basics here for all my Bluetooth devices. But if I Option click on it I get a lot of the other information as well. The same is true for WiFi and a lot of these other Status Menus. Now in the Notifications icon here that's always at the top right, if you Option click that it actually turns on Do Not Disturb. You can see when it's grayed out you have Do Not Disturb turned on. Option click it again to turn off Do Not Disturb. 

Now I mentioned that third party apps often add menu bar icons. Some third party apps are just about that. They just add a menu bar icon to give you extra functionality. One way to find those is to go to the Mac App Store and search for Menu Bar, two words. Apple's got a store here that you can go into and they list a bunch of apps that do this. So some of these are apps that provide some functionality and have a menu bar icon like 1Password, Fantastical, Day One, journaling software and some other things. Here's one that gives you information about your AirPods on the menu bar. Here's another one that shows you free space on your drives. Here's one that brings your contacts into the menu bar. Here's one that allows you to set timers in the menu bar. If you just look at the results for Menu bar you'll find other ones as well. All sorts of menu bar apps that do all sorts of different things that could be useful to you.

Now there are also apps that will help you reduce the clutter in your menu bar by hiding some of the items. There are bunch of different ones. One's called Vanilla. Another one is called bartender. Another is called Dozer. There's also one in the Mac App Store called Hidden Bar. I've installed that one to demonstrate. You could see here I've got this little control here where if I click it everything to the left side is gone. So I could move some of my menu bar icons here to the left side and then click here and it removes those. So it cleans things up. Then I can click it to reveal them.

You could also control the Status Menus using only the keyboard. To do that, first check your keyboard shortcut for this. Go to System Preferences. Go to Keyboard, Shortcuts, and then Keyboard. Look at the last item. Move focus to status menus. For me it's Control F8 and I have it turned on. I have it check marked there. Now in order to use F8 you may have to hold the fn key down on your keyboard depending upon your setting right here. So let me try it. I'm going to do Control F8. You could see it selects the first Status Menu. I could use the arrow keys, right and left, to move between them. I could use down arrow to enter the menu and continue to down arrow and then Return to select one or Escape to exit.

So here's a couple last tips. One is the Spotlight icon has a special function. If you click on it, of course, brings up Spotlight Search. You could drag this somewhere else on the screen. If you want to get it back to its original location just click and hold and it will pop back into place. This last tip is the most powerful one. It's kind of expert level. If you run Script Editor, an app that comes with your Mac that allows you to create scripts in JavaScript and AppleScript to control your Mac and different applications, there's a special function in Script Editor Preferences where you could Show Script menu in menu bar. You get this special script menu here. You could also select to Show Computer scripts. So scripts that are shared between users. Then you can click on this and you can get all these different scripts, some of which come with your Mac, some of which, of course, you can create in Script Editor to do all sorts of things. You can actually create scripts in Script Editor to launch apps and perform all sorts of different functions and then access them right here as a menu bar icon. You can even assign keyboard shortcuts to these since they are in the menu bar. So you could do that in System Preferences by using the exact name of the menu item.