Mac Basics: Customizing Toolbars

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to customize toolbars on your Mac. 

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Most Mac apps that you use have a Toolbar at the top with various buttons. You can customize these, especially with the Apple-made apps. But even third party apps allow you to do this too. So let's start off by looking at Safari. Here is the Toolbar at the top. You can see all these different buttons that are here in various different positions. You can customize what appears here and in what order it appears very easily. To get to the Customization Settings go to View and then Customize Toolbar. Then you'll see the Toolbar, the items in it will kind of wiggle from side to side. This shows that they are editable. Also you'll find this control here that shows you all of these different buttons that you can add. 

Now to move things around you can just click and drag. So I can move this button to the right or to the left. To Remove it just drag it down and it will go away. To Add something in I just drag it up and put it in that place. So often the buttons that you can add are more than what's originally there. So there's some extra functionality. Usually it's things that you can get to in the Menus but having a button in the Toolbar can be handy. There are often things like a space or flexible space that you can add as well to space things out so they are not all bunched together to the left or to the right or in the middle. So, for instance, here in Safari let's add a Bookmarks button right next to the Forward and Backward buttons. Let's add a Zoom over here on the right next to the Share button here. Since I'm a developer I'm going to add a button here to get to the Web Inspector as well. Now when I click Done this is what my Toolbar looks like. 

Another way to get into Customization Settings is to Control Click, right click on a mouse or two-finger click on a trackpad and bring up the Context Menu here. You have to click somewhere where's there is a blank space on the Toolbar. Then you can choose Customize Toolbar and that will bring up the same set of controls. This is a little easier to remember. Now if you want to ever restore things to the default you've got this Default set down here. It's one big draggable thing. So you drag this up into the Toolbar and it resets everything to the default. So it's easy to play around with the Toolbar. Add a few things, remove a few things and if you find you'd rather go back to the Default and start over it's easy to do that. 

Just about every Mac App has a Toolbar that you can customize. For instance here we are in the Finder. You've got a Toolbar just like you do in Safari. You can customize it the same way. So let's Customize Toolbar here. Then you could see I have various different things that I could drag into it. So, for instance, I could add a New Folder button here. I could add a Quick Look button here. Maybe I could get rid of the Tag button by dragging it down and customize this as I want. Note that in some Toolbars, like in the Finder, you also have a Show option here where you can choose Icon Only, Icon and Text, and just Text. You also get this option when you Control Click in the Toolbar. You can see I can choose one of those in addition to Customize Toolbar. 

Now let's go into Mail because Mail is someplace where I'm often asked about the Toolbar. There were some major changes to how the Mail Toolbar looks between Catalina and Big Sur. Now a lot of people like to have some of these buttons on the left over here right above the list of messages. You can totally do that using Customize Toolbar. So let's go into View, and you could see Customize Toolbar is now down at the bottom. Now not only could I add a lot of things, Mail has a particularly large number of buttons that you can add, but I can move things over to the left. So, for instance, I've got this groups of buttons here that's Archive, Delete, and Junk. You could see it represented here. I could move that over to the left so it appears above the list. Or perhaps I want to get rid of it completely and just add Archive and Delete and leave off Junk. So they are available as individual buttons and a group of three buttons. So there are a lot of other interesting things you could add here in the Toolbar in Mail. 

But this isn't the only place that you could edit the Toolbar in Mail because Mail has two very different windows. There's this Viewing window here. But there's also the Mail Composition window. That's different and has a different Toolbar at the top. So if I go to customize this one there are different buttons here and behaves differently and separately from the main window Toolbar. 

Here we are in Pages and the top of the Pages window looks a little different than say Mail or the Finder or Safari. But you can customize this Toolbar just the same way. So I'll go to View, and Customize Toolbar is all the way here at the bottom. You can see there are a ton of different buttons I could add here in Pages. The same with Numbers and Keynote. 

Many third party apps allow you to customize the Toolbar as well. So here I am in Pixelmator Pro and you could see the Toolbar here and there are a bunch of buttons to the right. I could go to View, and then Customize Toolbar near the bottom. So you could see there are a few things I can add into the Toolbar for Pixelmator Pro. But that's not true for all third party apps. For instance here I am in Chrome and it kind of has a Toolbar here at the top but there's no option to customize it, at least not the standard Mac way. The same thing here for Word. Word actually has a very complex set of ribbons and other buttons at the top of the screen. There are a ton of ways to customize those using Microsoft's technique but they don't fit in with the Mac technique. 

But in most Apple made apps and apps made by developers specifically developing for the Mac you're going to find a Toolbar and the ability to customize it. So whatever Mac apps you're using take a look at the customization controls for the Toolbar and see what buttons you can add. See how maybe you can rearrange things to better fit your needs.