The Best Mac Menu Bar Settings to Change

The menu bar is the one strip of screen that is always visible, and most Macs waste it: no battery percentage, no seconds on the clock, and six icons you never click crowding out the two you do. Every one of these is a setting.

Fix the clock and the battery first

1. Battery percentage. Open System Settings → Control Centre, find Battery, and turn on Show Percentage. A battery icon tells you roughly; a number tells you whether to find a charger.
2. Seconds on the clock. Same screen, Clock Options → Display the time with seconds. Useful more often than it sounds, and it makes the menu bar feel alive.
3. 24-hour time. Clock Options → Use a 24-hour clock, or set it globally in General → Date & Time.
4. Date and day. The same Clock Options screen can show the day of the week and the date, which removes one reason to open the calendar.

Remove what you never click

Every system icon is controlled from System Settings → Control Centre. Go down the list and set anything you do not use to Don't Show in Menu Bar: Screen Mirroring, Now Playing, Focus, Bluetooth and Sound are the usual candidates. They all stay available inside Control Centre itself, one click away.

Third-party icons are removed in each app's own settings. For most, you can also hold Command and drag the icon straight off the menu bar.

Fit more in the same space

On a MacBook with a notch there is a hard wall: when the app's menus meet the status icons, macOS stops drawing icons with no warning. Reducing the padding around each item fits several more before that happens.

# tighter menu bar spacing, then log out and back in
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 8
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 6

# restore the defaults
defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing
defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding

The -currentHost flag is required. Leaving it out is the single most common reason this appears not to work.

Hide the bar entirely, or don't

macOS can auto-hide the menu bar the way it auto-hides the Dock: System Settings → Control Centre → Automatically hide and show the menu bar, with separate options for desktop and full screen. It gives you back a strip of screen and costs you a flick of the pointer whenever you need a menu.

A word of warning on notched MacBooks: hiding the menu bar leaves the notch area as a black band, so you gain less than you expect. Try In Full Screen Only first, which is the setting most people end up keeping.

The clock format nobody knows is editable

The menu bar clock is driven by a format string, and you can set it to anything you like: day and date, week number, or a compact form that saves space on a notched MacBook.

# e.g. "Mon 3 Feb 14:05"
defaults write com.apple.menuextra.clock DateFormat -string "EEE d MMM HH:mm"

# back to whatever Date & Time settings say
defaults delete com.apple.menuextra.clock DateFormat

Log out and back in, or restart the clock from Activity Monitor. The pattern letters are standard: EEE short weekday, d day, MMM short month, HH 24-hour, mm minutes, ss seconds. Note that changing this by hand can override the Control Centre checkboxes, so pick one route and stay with it.

Reorder what is left

Hold Command and drag any icon to move it. Put the two you use most nearest the clock, where your eye already goes. This works across system and third-party icons, and the order survives restarts.