
If you want to hide icons and get them out of the way without actually quitting the application–or if you just want to rearrange the icons and place them in a more convenient order–you’ll have to use third-party software for this.īartender is a popular application for doing this on a Mac. How to Rearrange Third-Party Icons with Bartender Other apps, like Dropbox, give you no such option. But there is a way around that. You’ll lose the ability to quickly add a note from the menu bar, but Evernote will leave your menu bar alone. For example, to hide the Evernote icon, open the Evernote application, click Evernote > Preferences, and uncheck the “Show Evernote Helper in the menu bar” option. This quits the application running in the menu bar, so you don’t want to do this if you actually need the functionality provided by the icon.ĭepending on the application, you may be also able to hide the icon from its settings. You can generally remove these icons by clicking them and selecting “Quit” or a similar option in their menus. Sadly, you cannot hide third-party icons this same way. This is true for most first-party menu bar icons. (Some may not even appear by default–like Bluetooth–but you can choose to show them from the Bluetooth pane in System Preferences.) If you later decide you miss Siri’s hot mess of colors alongisde those monochrome icons, you can re-enable it in System Preferences. Drag Siri’s inexplicably colorful icon off the menu bar, and you can remove it with one swift motion. You can also remove some first-party icons altogether the same way.

How to Remove Menu Bar Icons in All Versions of macOS But, if you just have a handful of preinstalled icons you want to rearrange, you can do it in a few seconds. It doesn’t work with the Spotlight or Notification Center icons, which are always located at the right side of the bar. It also doesn’t work with icons provided by third-party applications. However, this will only work with the clock, battery, Wi-Fi, Time Machine, audio, fast user switching and Bluetooth icons. If you’re stuck running a pre-Sierra version of OS X, you can still move icons by holding “Command” and dragging the icon around. How to Rearrange Menu Bar Icons in Older Versions of OS X If the clutter is all too much for you, you can hide the menu bar entirely until you need it.

It is sacred, it is unmovable, and there nothing you can do about it.Īnd as mentioned earlier, Apple also doesn’t let you hide third-party icons, the way Windows has for years and third party Mac apps like Bartender ($15) make possible. And when it comes to menu bar icons, Apple has decided that the Notification Center must take up the top-right position, complete with unnecessary white space to its right. Of course, it wouldn’t be Apple without some kind of arbitrary decision that takes away your choice.
