Why Is My Mac Menu Bar Missing?

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Is your Mac's Menu Bar missing? Let me show you why and how to get it back.

So you may notice that sometimes your Mac's Menu Bar goes missing. This is do to a setting you've got. But there are a variety of other reasons as well. For instance, let's take a look here at what happens if I use Pages and then go to full screen mode. That's by clicking this green button here or using View, Enter Fill Screen. Either one of these will take  Pages to Full Screen Mode and notice the Menu Bar, here at the top, is now gone. How do you access the commands that you need in the Menu Bar. 

Well, first you should know it's not really gone. It's still there. It's just is hidden until you move your pointer to the top of the screen. Then you can see it drops down. Then you can access it just like you do normally. Typically this doesn't pose any problems because you need to move your pointer up there anyway to use it. So having to move it up there to see it really isn't creating any extra actions that you need to do. But some people like to have it present at all times anyway. By default when you're in a full screen app, like Pages, or any app when you take it full screen the Menu Bar is hidden. Then when you are in regular Window Mode the Menu Bar is present. 

If you look in Mission Control, I'm going to use Control Up Arrow to bring up Mission Control. You can see I have two spaces here. A Desktop space and a Full Screen space. By default anytime you're in a Desktop space the Menu Bar is visible, and anytime you're in a Full Screen window space the Menu Bar is hidden and will only be revealed when you bring your pointer to the top. But you can actually make it visible when your apps are in Full Screen Mode. All you need to do is go into System Settings and then go to Menu Bar. This is in macOS Tahoe but you can search for Menu Bar in any version System Settings and find it. This is the same setting here; automatically Hide and Show the Menu Bar. There are four options. You can have it Always Hidden, remember this means it's hidden so always in this case means the Menu Bar is always hidden. As opposed to the opposite of that which is Never Hidden. In other words always visible. So keep that in mind. But you can also have it so the Menu Bar is hidden in Full Screen Mode Only or in Desktop Only. The opposite of each other there. 

So, if we switch to Never the Menu Bar stays the same here in Window Mode. But if we were to go to Full Screen Mode, say by using Pages here, you can see with that setting the Menu Bar is still visible here, even though the pointer is not near the top of the screen. So, either in a Desktop Space or in a Full Screen Window Space you'll see the Menu Bar all the time. 

Now you may be asking about the Menu Bar as in literally the Bar under the menu. You may wonder why it is hidden. Like right now looking here there it looks like there is no bar there. I see the menus, I see the buttons, but there is no Bar under it. Well if you want your Menu Bar to actually be a Bar there is a setting for that. It's in the same place here. It's actually the next setting down. Show Menu Bar Background. You turn that On you're always going to see a bar under the Menu Bar. It is going to be somewhat translucent so the color is going to reflect the color of your Desktop background. In this case a blue. 

Now another way that the Menu Bar is missing is it could be missing from a particular display, like if you have more than one display you'll only see the Menu Bar on one display. If you go to Displays here, in System Settings, you'll see your Displays and you can see I, in fact, have two. You only see one here right now. Now if I click Arrange here it will allow to arrange the display. So I can move my second display somewhere else, like that. However, notice the Menu Bar is also represented here. You can drag that and you can drag it to the display you want. So if you notice the Menu Bar is on the display you don't want it to be on and you want to move it. This Arrange Displays control here is where you move the Menu Bar to get it to sit on the display you want. 

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Now also notice here that you can change your resolution. I've got mine here to Show as a List. You can Control Click and select List or Thumbnails here. You can also select to Show All Resolutions to see or All Resolutions here. If you happen to be using a third party display, particularly if it is a TV and not really a computer display, it's very possible to set things up so that your Mac's screen actually goes beyond the edges of your TV. It can be done with certain configurations. In that case the top and maybe bottom of your screen could be cutoff and not visible on the TV. To fix that what you want to do is change the resolution here. Experiment with these. So if you kind of notice the Menu Bar is missing but it looks like the actual top of your screen is missing, as a matter of fact if you move your pointer up beyond the top and it disappears, then you're going to want to adjust your resolution and get it to fit your TV. Alternatively your TV may have settings as well to change how it is used to as a computer display and you want to play with those two. How you do that depends on which TV you have so you have to experiment.

Now notice here I have got Automatically Hide and Show Menu Bar set to Never. But that doesn't really mean Never. Because there are situations where you can have no Menu Bar. One of those situations is when you're playing a game. A lot of games are setup to get rid of the Menu Bar and take over the entire screen. That's really how the game works. The game may have a setting for this or it may not. But if the game is going to take over the whole screen there is not really much you can do about it. Perhaps look to see if the game can be played in Window mode. Sometimes that is an option in the Settings. Then you can play the game in a window and still see the Menu Bar. But even if you don't play games there is another situation where that happens. That's when playing a Keynote Presentation. If you play a Keynote Presentation normally notice the Menu Bar goes away even though I set it to Never in System Settings. That's just how Presentation works. It is the same as with Games, and you've got control here because you can go to Play and switch to Play in Window. When you play you'll see that you have the presentation in a window and the Menu Bar is still there. Better still, you can switch the window to Full Screen Mode and it acts just like a regular app in Full Screen Mode, meaning that the Menu Bar is still there at the top. 

I should point out that there are various reports of third party apps also causing the Menu Bar to disappear particularly if the third party app actually controls the Menu Bar, like it is an extension that lets you have a lot of buttons on the right side of your screen or somehow it changes the Menu Bar in some other ways. There could be settings there to have the Menu Bar disappear or it could just be the app misbehaving. So if you're still having trouble and you've got an extension that controls the Menu Bar in some way try disabling it and see if that fixes it. 

Finally I should point out that if none of these apply to you, the Menu Bar is still missing in some situations, you may just want to try a Restart. Some app you were using or may have used recently may be misbehaving and may have set the Menu Bar into some sort of bad mode. So Restarting may fix that. So give that a try if none of these other suggestions solve your problem. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.