How to organize Mac menu bar icons: move, hide and trim

To organize the icons in your Mac's menu bar, hold Command and drag them: sideways to change the order, or down off the bar to remove one of Apple's icons. Then choose which of Apple's items appear at all in System Settings > Control Center, and turn off other apps' icons in their own settings.

An organized menu bar is mostly a shorter one, especially on a MacBook with a notch, where icons that don't fit simply vanish. So before you move anything, it helps to decide what deserves a place. This post goes through a simple way to sort your icons, then how to move, remove and choose them, with the settings paths for recent versions of macOS.

Sort your icons into three groups

Start with an inventory. Read the menu bar from left to right and, for each icon, ask when you last clicked it. Most icons fall into one of three groups.

The rarely group is usually the biggest, and it is where the room comes from. Most of Apple's items there are still a click away inside Control Center, and most apps can still be opened from Spotlight with Command-Space even when their icon is gone.

How do you move icons in the Mac menu bar?

Hold Command and drag. That works for Apple's icons and for most other apps' icons in recent versions of macOS.

1. Hold down the Command key.
2. Click an icon and drag it left or right. The other icons shift out of the way.
3. Let go when it is where you want it, then release Command.

A few items stay fixed. Control Center and the clock sit at the far right, and you can't drag icons past them. Most icons keep their position after a restart, though an app that is updated or reinstalled can sometimes put its icon back where it started.

On a MacBook with a notch, the order matters more than it looks. When the right side of the bar runs out of space, macOS drops the icons nearest the notch first. So put the daily group on the far right, the glance group next to it, and anything you can live without nearest the notch, where it is the first to go.

How do you remove an icon from the menu bar?

That depends on whose icon it is.

Apple's icons

Hold Command and drag the icon down, off the menu bar, then let go. It disappears. This works for items such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Sound, Focus and Spotlight. To bring one back, use the Control Center settings in the next section.

Other apps' icons

Command-drag usually only reorders these: drag one off the bar and it snaps back. Instead:

• Look in the app's own settings. Most apps with a menu bar icon have an option along the lines of "Show in menu bar". Turn it off for anything you open less than daily.
• Quit it. If the app only needs to run now and then, quit it from its icon's menu and open it when you need it.
• Stop it opening at login. In System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions (just Login Items in macOS Sonoma), remove it from the "Open at Login" list, so its icon only appears when you open it yourself.

In macOS Tahoe, menu bar items have their own Menu Bar section in System Settings. If your version lists other apps' items there with a switch beside each, that is the simplest way to hide them.

Choose Apple's items in Control Center settings

In macOS Sonoma and Sequoia, open System Settings > Control Center. Each of Apple's items has a menu or switch for whether it shows in the menu bar, and they are split into three lists.

• Control Center Modules, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, AirDrop, Focus, Stage Manager, Screen Mirroring, Display, Sound and Now Playing. These are always inside Control Center anyway, so the menu bar copy is optional. Depending on the item, you can choose Show in Menu Bar, Always Show in Menu Bar, Show When Active or Don't Show in Menu Bar. Show When Active is a good middle ground for things like Screen Mirroring and Now Playing: the icon appears only while it is doing something.
• Other Modules, such as Accessibility Shortcuts, Battery, Hearing, Fast User Switching and Keyboard Brightness. Each has separate switches for the menu bar and Control Center, so you can move one into Control Center and off the bar.
• Menu Bar Only, such as Clock, Spotlight, Siri and Time Machine. These live only in the menu bar. You can hide Spotlight and still open it with Command-Space, and hide Siri if you call it by voice or with its keyboard shortcut.

Trim the clock

The clock is often the widest thing on the bar. Click Clock Options in the same pane. Set Show date to When Space Allows or Never, turn off Show the day of the week, or change Style to Analog, which shrinks the clock to a small round face. You can also turn off Show AM/PM if you know which half of the day it is.

In macOS Tahoe these settings moved into the Menu Bar section of System Settings, and the lists look different. If you can't find something, type its name into the search field at the top of System Settings.

Keep the bar short beside the notch

On a MacBook with a notch, the menu bar has a fixed amount of room to the right of the camera. Icons that don't fit are dropped, not squeezed, and there is no overflow menu to reach them. Apps with long menus make it worse, because their menus can spill past the notch and take icon space. If an icon has already gone missing, menu bar icons hidden behind the notch explains how to find out whether it is hidden or gone.

Once you have trimmed, a few changes give the remaining icons more room:

• Check the menu bar size. In System Settings > Accessibility > Display, "Menu bar size" set to Large makes the menu text bigger and fits fewer icons. Default fits more.
• Use a scaled resolution with more space. In System Settings > Displays, an option toward More Space makes everything a little smaller, the menu bar included. Check you aren't leaning in to read afterwards.
• Tighten the gaps. An unofficial Terminal setting packs status icons closer together. Menu bar icon spacing on a Mac covers it step by step, including how to undo it.

Revisit the bar every few months. Icons creep back as you install things, and a two minute tidy keeps the daily group visible.

Where Notchpals fits

Notchpals adds one icon to the menu bar, a pair of eyes. It belongs in the daily group, because that is where you pause the crew for an hour or until tomorrow morning, start a focus session and see whether the crew is resting (the eyes close while it is). Command-drag it toward the right so it isn't the first to vanish.

Everything else happens in the notch, the one part of the top of the screen that icons can't use. Characters slide down from it to remind you to drink water, sit up, rest your eyes or get to a meeting, then slide back up.

The crew can also cover for an icon you trim. If the battery icon goes to make room, macOS still warns you when the battery runs low, and a Tech care character such as Gumdrop, a gumball robot, comes by once the battery is under 20 percent and not charging:

GumdropLet's feed the laptop. The charger kind of snack. Battery's low!

It says nothing about the battery once the Mac is plugged in or full, so it never asks you to charge a laptop that already is.