The macOS menu bar is the strip running across the top of your display: Apple menu on the left, app menus next to it, system icons and the clock on the right. It's one of the oldest pieces of macOS — and one of the few you can still completely reshape without Terminal.
Here's how to customise every part of it, in order of effort.
1. Reorder icons (free, 10 seconds)
Hold Command and drag any menu bar icon left or right. That's the whole trick. It works on Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Battery, Sound, Now Playing, AirDrop, Focus, third-party apps — everything except the clock and Control Center, which are fixed on the far right.
If you want Sound near the clock and Battery on the far left, just drag them there. The order persists across reboots.
2. Hide or show built-in icons
Open System Settings → Control Center. Every module has three options: Show in Menu Bar, Don't Show in Menu Bar, Only Show When Active (where applicable).
Worth knowing:
- Battery can show a percentage by toggling "Show Percentage".
- Now Playing can be set to appear only when music or video plays.
- Spotlight can be hidden — Command-Space still works.
- Clock can show the date, day of week, seconds, AM/PM under "Clock Options".
3. Hide third-party icons
Same Command-drag trick: drag an icon down off the menu bar and it disappears. The app itself keeps running; you just lose the icon. To bring it back, open the app's preferences and re-enable the menu bar icon there.
4. Menu bar managers (for dense menu bars)
If you have ten or more icons, an organiser app pays for itself in seconds saved. Two solid picks:
- Ice — open source, free. Hides icons behind a chevron, lets you separate "always visible" from "click to reveal" groups.
- Bartender — paid, polished. More features: triggers, hotkeys, custom search, deeper third-party integrations.
On a 14" MacBook Pro, an organiser also keeps icons from getting hidden behind the notch when you have too many running.
Extend the menu bar — into the notch
NotchNest adds calendar, AI clipboard, Quick Notes, Pomodoro, music control and AirDrop to the notch area. Free on the Mac App Store.
5. Use the notch as a second menu bar
If your Mac has a notch — every MacBook Pro from 2021 onwards and every MacBook Air M2 onwards — you have a whole second region you can make interactive. macOS itself doesn't do anything with the notch, but NotchNest wraps it in a hover-activated glass panel.
Hover the notch with the cursor and the panel drops down: calendar, AI clipboard, Quick Notes, Pomodoro timer, Spotify/Apple Music controls, drag-to-AirDrop, File-Tray for recent files, and a one-tap camera mirror. Every widget can be toggled on or off in Settings, so you only see what you use.
That's a genuine menu-bar extension. You haven't added another icon to a crowded top bar — you've put functionality in space that was sitting empty.
6. Style the clock
System Settings → Control Center → Clock Options. You can show:
- Digital or analog clock
- Day of the week
- Date
- Seconds
- AM/PM or 24-hour
Power users often hide the menu bar clock entirely and put one in the notch via NotchNest, giving a larger, more legible clock with built-in calendar awareness.
7. Auto-hide the menu bar
System Settings → Control Center → Automatically hide and show the menu bar. Set to "Always", "On Desktop Only", or "In Full Screen Only". Useful on a 13" Air where every vertical pixel counts.
The hidden menu bar reappears when you move the cursor to the top of the screen.
8. Reset everything
If you've broken the menu bar layout and can't remember what was where, quit each app whose icon appears and relaunch it; default position returns. For Apple icons, set them all to "Show in Menu Bar" and the original left-to-right order returns.
That's the full kit. For more on the notch specifically, read What is the macOS notch? and How to use the MacBook notch.