Clean Up the Right Side of Your Menu Bar

The right side of your Mac's menu bar can get crowded with lots of menu bar icons from system settings or third-party apps. Learn how to remove some and access the same functions almost as easily.

Comments: 13 Responses to “Clean Up the Right Side of Your Menu Bar”

    Doug
    12 months ago

    Good suggestions. I've been using Bartender 4 on my MacBook Air. It's got such a small screen and the notch, so that's really helped.

    D
    12 months ago

    Great info EXCEPT I was hoping it would apply to my iMac, OS Catalina Version 10.15.7. I cannot find the "Control Center" you refer to?

    12 months ago

    D: Control Center was added 2 versions back, in Big Sur.

    nick
    12 months ago

    Gary: there doesn't seem to be a way to remove the Eject icon from my menu, I don't see it listed in the Control Center and can't remove it with CMD-drag. When I click on the icon it shows a No Drives greyed out message, I'm guessing it's not an option to remove it. thx

    Louis Martin
    12 months ago

    Using a Mac since 1984 and with each new OS's, things gets easier to do but with exceptions for simple things. On my right menu bar in Ventura, at the end of a short list of items appears the hour (my choice) but not the date or day. There is no immediate one-click way on Ventura to get the date et day. On older OS's like SL, clicking on the hour got you the day and date. Now on Ventura clicking on the hour, you get no new recent notification and a modify widgets. Trivial but still noteworthy.

    12 months ago

    Louis: Why not click Edit Widgets and then add a small Calendar widget to the very top? Then you can easily see a nice date when you click the time.

    Louis Martin
    12 months ago

    Your suggestion works. But it is not evident to find this out by ourself. Is this noted somewhere ? Or found out by exploring ?

    12 months ago

    Louis: You find out by learning about the Notification Center widgets. But I think a calendar widget may even be there by default. Maybe at some point you removed it? I have several videos on them, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go1obgrOyYk

    David Tattersall
    12 months ago

    Gary, many thanks for another great video, the right of my menu bar is now cleaned up. Is there anyway to force the menu bar to temporarily show items hidden behind the notch so I can see what is hidden?

    12 months ago

    David: Not really. They aren't technically "behind" the notch but are not shown at all because space isn't available. All you can do is to remove the items you don't want like I show here and add any back that you want after deciding what to keep.

    David Tattersall
    12 months ago

    Thanks for clearing that up and your quick reply.

    Bruce Mann
    12 months ago

    I found that if you have ONE too many icons in the right side of the menu bar (third party app), the last one is indeed hidden behind the notch. You can cmd-drag one of the visible icons into the notch, and the previously hidden icon switches position with it. It doesn't really solve anything, but it does work. (This is on 14" MBP/M1).

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