How to Customize Control Center on Mac

Control Center is the Mac's junk drawer of quick controls — Wi-Fi, Sound, Focus, Display, and a dozen more behind one menu bar icon. What's less obvious is that nearly every module can also be pinned to the menu bar as its own icon, or tucked away entirely. All of it is governed from one settings pane, plus a drag gesture most people never discover.

One pane, three groups

Open System Settings → Control Center. Every module is listed, but they come in three flavors — understanding the grouping saves confusion on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia alike:

• Control Center Modules — Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, AirDrop, Focus, Stage Manager, Screen Mirroring, Display, Sound, Now Playing. These always live inside Control Center; the dropdown only decides whether each also gets its own menu bar icon (some offer "Show When Active" — appearing only while in use).
• Other Modules — Accessibility Shortcuts, Battery, Hearing, Fast User Switching, Keyboard Brightness, Music Recognition. Each has two independent toggles: Show in Menu Bar and Show in Control Center. Battery adds a Show Percentage option.
• Menu Bar Only — Clock (with its own Clock Options sheet), Spotlight, Siri, and Time Machine. These never appear inside Control Center; the dropdown controls the menu bar alone.

Pin a module by dragging it

1. Click the Control Center icon (two pills) at the right of the menu bar.
2. Drag any module — say, Sound — out of the panel and up onto the menu bar.
3. Drop it where you want it to live.

That's the fast path: the corresponding setting flips to Show in Menu Bar automatically. It's also the easiest way to discover what can be pinned — anything you can drag, you can keep.

Remove and rearrange

Hold Cmd and drag icons along the menu bar to reorder them; drag one off the bar and release to remove it (its setting flips to Don't Show — fully reversible from the same pane). Two fixtures won't budge: the Clock and the Control Center icon itself are permanent residents. If your bar is still crowded after pruning — a notch MacBook fills fast — remember that everything you remove stays one click away inside Control Center, which is precisely what it's for.

A sensible starter layout

If you want a proven arrangement rather than an afternoon of tinkering: set Battery to show in the menu bar with Show Percentage on (laptops live and die by this), Sound to Always Show for one-drag volume and output switching, Focus to Show When Active so silence is never invisible, and Bluetooth on if you use AirPods or a wireless mouse daily. Then go the other way: Spotlight and Siri out of the menu bar — both keep working by keyboard — and Now Playing to When Active unless you're a constant music controller.

That nets out to roughly the same number of icons you started with, but every one earns its place. Don't overlook Music Recognition while you're in the pane — it's Shazam built into the menu bar, one click to identify whatever's playing nearby. The whole exercise takes five minutes, everything is a dropdown you can re-flip, and the difference in daily friction is larger than any single setting suggests.

Everything here is per-user, too — your layout lives with your account, so tuning the bar on a shared Mac disturbs nobody else's setup.

When third-party icons pile up

Control Center settings only govern Apple's own modules — every third-party app plants its own menu bar icon, and those accumulate. See how to hide menu bar icons on Mac for taming the rest of the bar.