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Built-in workaround for applications hiding under the MacBook Pro notch

257 points by onnimonni 3y ago

onnimonni 3y ago
I learned yesterday about this setting which can be change the default whitespace in MacOS menu bar to get access to apps which would otherwise be hidden under the notch. Many of my colleagues told me they were happy so I thought it might be useful for wider audience as well. I know that the HN guidelines recommend linking to source directly but I think short blog post with images is easier to understand and I hope this is okay :)
tambourine_man 3y ago
Wow, thank you. Someday Apple will expose the gazillion defaults write options in a “Pro” tab in System Settings. One can dream.
- lbourdages 3y ago
  Back in the day there was a "secrets" third party preference pane you could install. It would let you toggle a bunch of options like this. https://osxdaily.com/2009/12/11/access-a-whole-bunch-of-hidden-mac-preferences-with-secrets/ https://osxdaily.com/2009/12/11/access-a-whole-bunch-of-hidd...
Eric_WVGG 3y ago
> While it offers many features, I've refused to pay for a solution to Apple's poor design decision. The phrasing of this kind of gets under my skin. Like, it's fine to call it "refusing to pay" if it's some kind of Apple tax. Bartender is great little indie app, a real quality-of-life enhancement. I like to reward creative developers who come up with solutions for weird edge-case users like us.
- clawoo 3y ago
  > While it offers many features, I've refused to pay for a solution to Apple's poor design decision. Well then you're in luck, because there's a free app called Hidden Bar[1] on the Mac App Store that allows you to hide icons which you're not interested in. I am not affiliated with the author(s?), I am just a happy user and I would probably be using it even if the Macbook didn't have a notch. [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hidden-bar/id1452453066?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hidden-bar/id1452453066?mt=12
  - thesuitonym 3y ago
    Still sort of insane that you need extra apps to fix an issue that Microsoft figured out decades ago. The GP says it was in Windows Vista, but I'm pretty sure even Windows 98 had it. I know XP did. How has Apple not addressed this?
    - seba_dos1 3y ago
      98 did not, XP was the first one. So, this was addressed there merely 23 years ago, give them some slack! ;)
    - evilduck 3y ago
      Weirder still is that they did, they have an entire expanding control panel pane with redundant pop out controls for stuff that was previously in the menu bar, they just failed to universally integrate it with the system so that third parties could use it.
  - bitcurious 3y ago
    Hidden bar has the added benefit of not asking to record your screen, an insane thing to consent to for this very basic bit of functionality.
  - onnimonni 3y ago
    > Well then you're in luck, because there's a free app called Hidden Bar[1] on the Mac App Store that allows you to hide icons which you're not interested in. Author here: I did try Hidden Bar yesterday before finding this workaround and I uninstalled it today. I want to see all of the 16 apps that I have. I don't want to hide any of them. By changing the whitespace mentioned in the blog post I now can see all of them.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  I can understand the sentiment. It's not necessarily something against independent developers, it's anger about a problem that shouldn't happen in the first place to a device this expensive. Windows had a similar problem with its notifications tray growing to unreasonable size, and they fixed that back in Windows Vista, after applying some auto-hiding algorithm in versions before that. Apple missing this problem or not being able to come up with a solution is simply not believable, this has to be the result of them simply not caring or refusing to address the issue for stylistic reasons. I'm sure Bartender is great software (even without the notch problem, from what I can tell!) but Apple is the one forcing their users to pay extra for their stupid design decisions. $16 to fix a problem other operating systems fixed almost twenty years ago is a steep price to pay when you're expecting a quality laptop.
  - onnimonni 3y ago
    Thanks @jeroenhd for giving me the benefit of doubt and explaining it even better than I could! My intention was definitely not to bash bartender and I need to select my words more carefully in the future. It was just the only solution I knew before yesterday for a such a simple stupid design flaw from Apple. I have nothing against Bartender or its developers. I just wish I wouldn't need to install 3rd party software to fix Apple's issues.
    - haswell 3y ago
      There was a time when I would have agreed pretty whole-heartedly with you and dismissed this as a "simple stupid design flaw". I've been writing production code for over 20 years, and the existence of solutions like Bartender is evidence that the problem can't be that hard, right? And then I became a product manager for a large suite of capabilities for which large customers would spend millions/year, and my mind changed pretty significantly. Every release, I was forced to choose the 10-15 things that we could reasonably accomplish from a list of hundreds. Many dozens of the things that we didn't do could be classified as "simple stupid design flaws". There was one of these flaws in particular that I was determined to fix when I took the role. "This makes us look stupid" I thought. It had been a gap in the product for years, and I always marveled at the fact that no one had fixed it. But the reality was, the product was architected to be extensible, and to allow 3rd party developers to build their own solutions. And in this case, there were numerous solutions in the community that solved the problem quite well. When faced with the reality of a mile-long backlog, and many of those items having no solution at all, and no affordance for developers to solve them, the already-solved design flaw always fell below the cut line for each release, despite my best efforts to prioritize it. And I begrudgingly had to acknowledge that this was the right choice at the time. I have a slightly different view on these types of issues now. It's easy to call this a design flaw, but on the flip side, Apple has clearly made it possible for the community to solve this issue. I'm 100% positive someone at Apple is trying their hardest to get this thing fixed, but most likely keeps getting thwarted by more critical issues, and the realities of managing a large and complex platform/ecosystem. "Apple has all the money; they should just scale up the dev team". And if they did, those new devs would be assigned to the next 10-15 items on that mile-long list that are still more important than a 1st party solution to a solved problem. It does show the cracks in Apple's marketing, but it's also far more understandable and reasonable than I once would have believed. (I don't/didn't work for Apple).
- pushedx 3y ago
  30% or more of the cost goes directly to Apple, so there are some perverse incentives at play with such unofficial fixes.
  - hannes0 3y ago
    You can purchase directly on their website or via Setapp. So, I would count this as an argument.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    I assure you that whatever money Apple would make from this wouldn’t make a dent in even some lower-level Apple pleb’s P&L. This sort of unbound cynicism isn’t intelligent or useful. It shouldn’t be conflated with being usefully or interestingly critical.
    - lynndotpy 3y ago
      It adds up when you need to pay $25 to get per-app volume control, $20 to fix to the menu bar, $10 to get window management, etc, per seat. I don't think it's cynical to point out the perverse incentive. I think it's a useful point for discussion, especially given anyone familiar with any of the other major desktop environments (Windows, GNOME, KDE, etc.) might be surprised to learn that there's a modern desktop environment lacking these amenities.
  - jlokier 3y ago
    The App Store fee is down to 15% these days*, or zero if you buy Bartender from their own website. * For entities with < $1M annual revenue.
- aqme28 3y ago
  “Refusing to pay for…Apple’s design decisions” makes no sense when you just spent $2000 on an Apple laptop, in order to not pay an indie dev $16
  - wtetzner 3y ago
    I think the point is that you shouldn't need to spend anything extra after spending $2,000 on an Apple laptop for something Apple should have already addressed.
- OJFord 3y ago
  No, that's clearly not 'I should not have to pay Bartender for its work'; it's 'I should not have to find a third-party who can sell me a fix'.
- coconut08 3y ago
  especially considering that apple is full of poor design decisions that people have already been using third party software to compensate for. for example a lack of any form of reasonable window management that the many people use stuff like magnet or rectangle to compensate for. or the fact that mouse scroll direction and trackpad scroll direction are linked. or the fact that you can't control volume on a per app basis.
- delfinom 3y ago
  Handling the app icons properly due to the notch IS something that Apple should have done. It's pure idgaf incompetence on Apple's part. Their software quality has been declining the past few years in respects to macOS.
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    > Their software quality has been declining the past few years in respects to macOS Was there a previous version of MacOS where this problem was solved? I remember literally running into this same problem on Macintosh System 7 when running MS Office apps that had too long menus for a PowerBook screen, there was a third party app back then as well to solve it (by replacing the "File", "Edit", etc menu names with icons to make them shorter)
- lxgr 3y ago
  Besides the freeware/shareware issue, I'd like to limit the number of various little tools running on my computer, often with effectively full access to my data (since software that provides that type of quality-of-life improvements for core OS functionality is often hard/impossible to sandbox). I can't even use most of these on my work Mac for the same reason (it's outright not allowed/possible by policy).
- daviddever23box 3y ago
  It is perfectly acceptable to provide a zero-cost, command-line focused solution to a single, specific user-interface constraint, while, at the same time, providing additional parametric insight to macOS user preferences.
- sunshowers 3y ago
  More than the cost, it's the fact that it's yet another app with its own updater, attack surface, etc that's a bother. (I don't know if this app has an App Store version available -- but in general, even if they are, they're often worse than the non-App Store versions.)
yardie 3y ago
Longterm Mac OS users have used tools like Onyx[0] to configure hidden system and finder settings. It's probably one of my first downloads after an OS upgrade. [0] https://titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html https://titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html
- suction 3y ago
  [dead]
- therealmocker 3y ago
  Could you share some examples of settings you customize with this tool? The description on the website seems pretty fairly broad.
josephd79 3y ago
I just use TopNotch.
- speedgoose 3y ago
  It's not doing what you think it does.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Broken in Sonoma
  - luuurker 3y ago
    Top Notch is working well here with 14.3.1. This app only makes the menu bar black though, so it's not really a fix for what the article complains about.
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      I can’t get it to work with dynamic wallpapers. It defaults to the generic sonoma hills wallpaper.
      - luuurker 3y ago
        I use a static wallpaper, maybe that's why I don't have issues with it.
tw04 3y ago
Bartender is an app that will let you hide items/hide items in a submenu. I have no affiliation, and it just works. I’m guessing there’s something similar open source but I’ve yet to stumble across one that works as well. https://www.macbartender.com/ https://www.macbartender.com/
- iAkashPaul 3y ago
  HiddenBar
  - neodymiumphish 3y ago
    When I open the hidden bar, they still expand "behind" the notch. What am I doing wrong?
    - evilduck 3y ago
      Nothing. HiddenBar will declutter your menu bar by hiding things but it doesn’t help with having so many menu bar items that they’re obscured by the notch like Bartender does.
      - neodymiumphish 3y ago
        Damn, ok. Thanks for the clarification.
    - iAkashPaul 3y ago
      Use this whitespace reducing config with HiddenBar for a compact menu bar icon set
- DavideNL 3y ago
  Yea, Bartender does its job really well… simple and stable. Would also recommend.
- tanepiper 3y ago
  $20 for what should have been the workaround from Apple for their design decision. I mean really, too many icons - have a widget to display the rest on click - the number of times I have to kill Alfred to get to Docker Desktop is more than I can count on one hand.
iAkashPaul 3y ago
HiddenBar is a FOSS alternative to Bartender, combined with reduced whitespace it'll be quite nice!
Erratic6576 3y ago
There’s a FOSS alternative to bartender
- euroderf 3y ago
  Do tell
  - DarthNebo 3y ago
    HiddenBar
    - Erratic6576 3y ago
      Yessir, Thank you very much
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  Why would you drop a comment like this without saying what it is?
  - Erratic6576 3y ago
    Sorry I meant to look it up on alternativeto.net but I got distracted because it would have taken me 3 seconds on my laptop. Damn mobile phones Hiddenbar. It might not be as shiny as bartender but it gets the job done
SteveAlexander 3y ago
You don't need to log out / in after trying this. You can instead restart the service that runs the menu bar. killall -KILL SystemUIServer
- onnimonni 3y ago
  EDIT: I tried this out and at least it didn't work for me. The whitespace did change a bit after running your command but not as much as happens when I log out and log in.
Simulacra 3y ago
I find the notch the be an utterly horrible design choice. Like the iPhone notch, it seems like a major step back in aesthetic. I found both too distracting for comfort.
- lioeters 3y ago
  I agree, Steve Jobs would have never accepted such a design compromise.
flohofwoe 3y ago
I really like my M1 Mac, but the notch has to be the dumbest design decision in the history of laptops :/ I would accept any design compromise for the webcam, make it grainy / low-res and put it under the display, put it at the bottom so it points up my nose, or move into a small 'corner notch' in the top-right corner so that the camera looks at me from the side ... anything really but please get rid of that stupidly oversized center notch.
- bri3k 3y ago
  You can change the resolution in System Settings->Displays, make it so the entire display is below the notch.
  - flohofwoe 3y ago
    The thing is, I really like the thin bezel, but why has the notch to be so massively big? The camera hole looks like it's just about 3..4 millimeters in diameter. PS: also looking around, there seem to be plenty of laptops with thin display bezel and no notch, if others can do it, why not Apple?
    - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
      > PS: also looking around, there seem to be plenty of laptops with thin display bezel and no notch, if others can do it, why not Apple? Because those laptops have worse webcams. You don't have to agree with the tradeoff Apple made, in fact I don't, but I think the reasoning is pretty clear.
    - Waterluvian 3y ago
      There’s like four different things in the notch. Not just a camera. Plus some recessed screw holes to mount it. The notch feels weird, but when I try to redesign it without sacrificing features, I can’t come up with a better option. …Not that I’m a brilliant designer by any means.
      - pimanrules 3y ago
beretguy 3y ago
People need to vote with their wallets and stop buying MacBooks with a notch instead of complaining.
- stewx 3y ago
  IMO, complaining is probably a more effective way to get the message to Apple in this case than buying a different computer.
- evilduck 3y ago
  To buy a Windows laptop with a half dozen worse problems instead? Hard pass, I’ll take an even bigger notch instead please.
- samatman 3y ago
  Avoiding excellent hardware because of a software bug is pretty short-term thinking. I want the notch. I also want the OS to behave correctly, given the notch. That's not too much to ask, and no, it's not worth ragequitting the entire ecosystem over. YMMV on that one.
- felixding 3y ago
  Yes. I bought a M2 MBP because this is the only Macbook that I can find on the market which has the specs I wanted and does not have the notch. I also hate the Touch Bar, which to me is useless and annoying, but at least it doesn't look awfully ugly, like the notch.
  - evilduck 3y ago
    You can change the display resolution to hide the notch on any Mac and it just makes the top bezel appear as tall as the notch is, which is about the same size as the pre-notch models. Same result, newer hardware options. I would have prefer they at least performed some Dynamic Island UI trickery with the notch when they added it, instead of it just being a quite literal notch out of the desktop that the OS seems barely aware of.
stewx 3y ago
The free app Dozer gives you the ability to move icons into a collapsible section, which also solves this problem from a different angle. https://github.com/Mortennn/Dozer https://github.com/Mortennn/Dozer
- avnigo 3y ago
  It doesn't look like it solves the problem. https://github.com/Mortennn/Dozer/issues/168 https://github.com/Mortennn/Dozer/issues/168
deleted 3y ago
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LaSombra 3y ago
All this added padding from the last few releases forces me to believe this is in preparation for a port to iPad or AVP. EDIT: The hardware is there, it's just a matter of getting the right UX in place.
jwr 3y ago
I don't mind the notch (I understand the reason it's there and it's a compromise), but it boggles my mind that Apple decided to just place the icons under the notch, where they aren't visible. This is a clear example of lack of dogfooding: clearly Apple executives do not use many apps, or they would have been infuriated at the stupid problem.
- nottorp 3y ago
  Apple executives don't have time to use computers :)
- samatman 3y ago
  Apple no longer lives in fear of Steve Jobs. This is just the latest brain-dead problem which would have obviously been fixed before it shipped in the face of Steve's cold fury.
Saris 3y ago
How come apple doesn't just 'jump' over the notch and keep displaying icons on the left side like android does?
xwowsersx 3y ago
This drives me nuts. I resort to quitting applications until I've removed enough that the app I'm looking for is visible again. I did use bartender for a while. I can't remember why I stopped using it.
- onnimonni 3y ago
  Author here: Sounds very familiar. I used this exact same "Poor Man's process" up until yesterday :D
notorandit 3y ago
The real point for me is: where were all Apple Egineers when the decision ws taken to add (or actually remove) that notch to the display? Have then been called in at all? I can hardly think that the decision came from the engineers: that would not solve any technical problem or add any extra technical feature. Just whoes. The decision likely came from the marketing. Fancy and stylish decisions (the nothces) on engineered stuff (the Mac) should require the former to beg the latter for a go/no go badge. I think you can put a camera in any of the 4 corners in a bezel, you can put it (back) in the middle of the upper bezel, maybe in the middle of the lower bezel. Or ask you Apple fans to use their iPhone as a camera. Look at where they put cameras in a Tesla. Not where it is nice, but where it is effective under all the points of vieew. To me the notch is totally useless also in my phone as it doesn't add anything. It rather makes some of my screen real estate unavailable. Just to get a slimmer bezel which is not a useful feature. I would rather sacrify some of the bezel to get back my perfectly rectagular display without any rounded corners (another pesky marketing-driven decision) or nothces. Meh!
- tiltowait 3y ago
  While I doubt anyone at Apple wants to keep the notch forever, I imagine the engineers justified the notch as adding screen real estate, and rightly so. The display's size ratio is 1728:1117, which is slightly taller than the 16:10 of the older displays—taller by exactly the size of the notch, in fact. So while it's a bit unsightly, it does serve the functional purpose of allowing them to raise the "ears" of the monitor about the size of the menu bar[1]. Prior to owning this Mac, I always set the menu bar to autohide, which wasn't the greatest UX but gave me some extra screen space. Now I can keep the same space and have the menu bar always visible. Seems like a win to me. [1] Yes, they could have just made the top bezel bigger and had no notch, but that would have have meant having a smaller screen or a larger footprint for the laptop. I don't like the notch one bit, but I think they made the correct choice.
  - noqc 3y ago
    >I think they made the correct choice. Do you understand how much harder layout is when its not on a rectangle?
dorianmariefr 3y ago
You can kill "Core" processes if you don't want to log out/log in
- onnimonni 3y ago
  Author here: Can you test this and share a working one-liner? I will happy to add it into the blog post. I tried few commands like this but they didn't work consistently for me.
  - dorianmariefr 3y ago
    ps -A | grep Core | awk '{ print $1 }' | xargs kill -9 I usually use dorian-each gem
luuurker 3y ago
I've been using Bartender since before the notch because often the space isn't enough. This is something macOS needs to handle better. The notch itself only removed some space, but the problem was already there.
Tagbert 3y ago
This is a “problem” that existed before the notch was born and has been fixed with Bartender (and clones) for several years now. Anyone with lots of app icons would run into situations where the icons would not all fit on the menu bar. Bartender gave us control and helped reduce the clutter. The problem didn’t start with the notch, it just made it more likely that someone would run into it.
jonhohle 3y ago
As the author of a current and many past Menu Extras, holy crap! Why would anyone have so many menu bar apps!
- eitally 3y ago
  I don't have that many, but they can definitely add up. On my work machine, where we have a need to provision multiple VPN options for technical staff working on client projects, I have menu bar icons for 3 VPNs, not to mention SentinelOne, Cylance, and CarbonBlack... and Google Drive Sync, and then a few others for software I've installed.
- lemming 3y ago
  I find that I only have a couple, but I have a lot of system services in the menu bar. I currently have (apart from time/date): siri, control centre, the user switcher, wifi, battery, bluetooth, music, volume, spotlight, time machine and keyboard layout. Some of those show up by default, and some I had to turn on (bluetooth, keyboard layout). But that's all just default system stuff. I have only 3 custom apps, and the next one will go behind the notch by the look of it.
nerdjon 3y ago
The large amount of white place has been driving me insane for a while, glad to see there is a fix I will need to check this out later. But I don't understand why Apple did not take a page out of Windows's taskbar. If there are too many make a dropdown. They are already easily draggable and removable so concern about bloat isn't really a concern. If I have them there I want them there and accessible.
bloblaw 3y ago
The open-source Hidden Bar is my current solution to this problem, but I think I prefer this native fix. https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden brew install --cask hiddenbar
aeturnum 3y ago
> * I discovered a free, native macOS solution that doesn't require installing Bartender or any other additional apps.* > You can adjust the values from 0 to 6 to accommodate even more icons. Personally, I found 6 to be a good fit. It's ultimately a really petty point - but this is not a fix. This increases the number of apps on the top bar before the problem occurs. Bartender (and hidden[1] - which I discovered in this thread) fix the problem. Calling a technique that delays the problem "a solution" after sneering at a project that actually is a solution just rubs me the wrong way. Edit: Though I'll leave my rude comment in its original form, it's also important to note that OP added a note clarifying this may not fix the problem for everyone in what I thought was a mature reaction to a petty complaint. [1] https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden
- onnimonni 3y ago
  You're correct that there are certain scenarios that won't be addressed by this. Would it be more fair to say to write that this will only postpone the issue? To offer a counterexample, I've been using my machine for slightly over a year now, and the number of applications running in the menu bar have stabilized to 16 apps. So this undeniably resolves the issue on my machine and for my usage. EDIT: I think this was a great point and I added a notice section to the blog post so that everyone using this hack will be well informed to make best decisions. Thanks for the feedback!
  - aeturnum 3y ago
    I appreciate you taking my very petty feedback! I totally agree that it's a clever change that will allow most people to avoid the problem.
    - onnimonni 3y ago
      I really appreciate your original comment and it was straight to the point. It's probably good to still reflect about that part since other users might feel offended. Thanks also for the EDIT part too. It makes me feel that HN users won't tolerate bullshit but will nonetheless give great feedback :) Your comment original comment lead me to ask if HN admins could rephrase the blog article from: "Native macOS fix for applications hiding under the MacBook Pro notch" -> "Built-in MacOS workaround for applications hiding under the MacBook Pro notch" Which is more accurately representing the contents of the article. I also changed the title in my own blog post to this already.
neither_color 3y ago
I found an alternative solution: the application Easyres, a little app that lets you change resolutions from the menu bar, has an alternative resolution that's about 30-40px shorter than the standard resolution. This gives you back the whole menu bar as it sits below the notch. It's a much cleaner look. The notch completely disappears and you forget it ever existed.
- swozey 3y ago
  I use bartender and try to keep the right side of my menu pretty light on taskbar stuff. I think I do lose a few things on my 14" but anything critical I want in 1 click is on the far right and visible.
klaushardt 3y ago
I just dump my default changes here. Maybe somebody finds something usefull for themself. Added the command from this thread too. :) Edit: Looks like i already did edit this before since mine was already at 8 and 12. Added the original source like its linked above. # Defaults and other Stuff sudo scutil --set HostName nix # https://macos-defaults.com/ defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSNavPanelExpandedStateForSaveMode -bool true defaults write NSGlobalDomain PMPrintingExpandedStateForPrint -bool true defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false defaults write com.apple.dock "autohide-delay" -float "0" && killall Dock defaults write com.apple.dock "autohide-time-modifier" -float "0.3" && killall Dock defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowScrollBars -string "Always"; killall Finder defaults write com.apple.screencapture "disable-shadow" -bool "true" defaults write com.apple.dock "tilesize" -int "38" && killall Dock defaults write com.apple.dock "mineffect" -string "scale" && killall Dock defaults write com.apple.finder "ShowExternalHardDrivesOnDesktop" -bool "false" && killall Finder defaults write com.apple.finder "ShowRemovableMediaOnDesktop" -bool "false" && killall Finder defaults write com.apple.dock "mru-spaces" -bool "false" && killall Dock defaults write com.apple.TimeMachine "DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup" -bool "true" defaults write com.apple.dock "enable-spring-load-actions-on-all-items" -bool "true" && killall Dock defaults write com.apple.Music "userWantsPlaybackNotifications" -bool "false" && killall Music # https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2023/12/16/macbook-notch-and-menu-bar-fixes/ # https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/16lpfg5/hidden_preference_to_alter_the_menubar_spacing/ # https://flaky.build/native-fix-for-applications-hiding-under-the-macbook-pro-notch # https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39343919 defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 8 defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 12 # https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/16ra8di/metal_hud_enabledisable_shortcut/ # https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/1271048e407543d391415934cad5edcd defaults write -g MetalForceHudEnabled -bool YES /bin/launchctl setenv MTL_HUD_ENABLED 1
onnimonni 3y ago
Author here: @dang other users here helped me to understand that the title is bit misleading. I was just eager to share about this and possibly help others with this knowledge without thinking about this correctly. I already renamed the article on my end and redirected it to a new url: https://flaky.build/built-in-workaround-for-applications-hiding-under-the-macbook-pro-notch https://flaky.build/built-in-workaround-for-applications-hid... Can you change the url and rename the submission title to: "Built-in MacOS workaround for applications hiding under the MacBook Pro notch" Thanks a lot and sorry for the trouble!
miles 3y ago
Here is the apparent origin post of this undocumented preference: Hidden preference to alter the menubar spacing https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/16lpfg5/hidden_preference_to_alter_the_menubar_spacing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/16lpfg5/hidden_prefe... The author describes tracing Bartender's activity to hunt down the method. And this blog post mentions higher values than 6 (recommending 12 for NSStatusItemSpacing and 8 for NSStatusItemSelectionPadding): How to fix Mac menu bar icons hidden by the MacBook notch https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2023/12/16/macbook-notch-and-menu-bar-fixes/ https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2023/12/16/macbook-notch-a...
icodestuff 3y ago
The notch is what it is: a compromise between webcam quality, branding, and thin bezels. But it’s hard to argue but that Apple’s software integration with it is mediocre at best. None of the extra space is usable except by anything but the awkwardly tall menu bar and the status items or menu extras it holds, and the system not being aware of the notch —sometimes— like letting status items pile up underneath, or being able to put the mouse pointer underneath it but not when a mouse button is held down (this behavior was removed in a late version of Ventura), or putting the picture-in-picture window partially underneath the menu bar (like it expects only a regular-sized menu bar to be there)… is symptomatic of a larger quality and integration problem at Apple, I think.
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actinium226 3y ago
I was hoping this article would show how you could make fullscreen apps actually fullscreen. It bothers me that the top of the app sits below the notch - there are some apps where there's nothing in the top middle that the notch would cover, and the apps would benefit from a little bit of extra real estate. Oh well, we wait and hope someone figures it out.
627467 3y ago
Hey, I love to bash appl like anybody else, and this notch issue is an equivalent dumb outcome as the magic mouse charging like a dead cockroach or the "you're holding the phone wrong". But my main concern is how EVERY Mac app nowadays feels the need to leave an icon on the "tray" leading to this problem in the first place. Notch or no notch, this pattern just doesn't scale. Am I the only one installing apps to hide the trays icons? On windows this hiding pattern come as default for years.
croemer 3y ago
Original source of this hack is: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/465674/330523 https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/465674/330523 I recommend upvoting (and favoriting) to make it more findable in the future (including my future self).
- onnimonni 3y ago
  Author here: This link is also mentioned in the sources section of the article and I did personally upvote that answer too in Stack Exchange.
  - croemer 3y ago
    Thanks for discovering that answer, improving on it (with screenshots) and sharing it on your blog which made it pop up here! My comment isn't a slight at all, it's just much easier (for me at least) to rediscover useful StackOverflow answers (by favoriting them) than to find a blog post.

257 points by onnimonni 3y ago

I learned yesterday about this setting which can be change the default whitespace in MacOS menu bar to get access to apps which would otherwise be hidden under the notch. Many of my colleagues told me they were happy so I thought it might be useful for wider audience as well. I know that the HN guidelines recommend linking to source directly but I think short blog post with images is easier to understand and I hope this is okay :)

tambourine_man 3y ago

Wow, thank you. Someday Apple will expose the gazillion defaults write options in a “Pro” tab in System Settings. One can dream.

lbourdages 3y ago
Back in the day there was a "secrets" third party preference pane you could install. It would let you toggle a bunch of options like this. https://osxdaily.com/2009/12/11/access-a-whole-bunch-of-hidden-mac-preferences-with-secrets/ https://osxdaily.com/2009/12/11/access-a-whole-bunch-of-hidd...

Eric_WVGG 3y ago

> While it offers many features, I've refused to pay for a solution to Apple's poor design decision. The phrasing of this kind of gets under my skin. Like, it's fine to call it "refusing to pay" if it's some kind of Apple tax. Bartender is great little indie app, a real quality-of-life enhancement. I like to reward creative developers who come up with solutions for weird edge-case users like us.

clawoo 3y ago
> While it offers many features, I've refused to pay for a solution to Apple's poor design decision. Well then you're in luck, because there's a free app called Hidden Bar[1] on the Mac App Store that allows you to hide icons which you're not interested in. I am not affiliated with the author(s?), I am just a happy user and I would probably be using it even if the Macbook didn't have a notch. [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hidden-bar/id1452453066?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hidden-bar/id1452453066?mt=12
- thesuitonym 3y ago
  Still sort of insane that you need extra apps to fix an issue that Microsoft figured out decades ago. The GP says it was in Windows Vista, but I'm pretty sure even Windows 98 had it. I know XP did. How has Apple not addressed this?
  - seba_dos1 3y ago
    98 did not, XP was the first one. So, this was addressed there merely 23 years ago, give them some slack! ;)
  - evilduck 3y ago
    Weirder still is that they did, they have an entire expanding control panel pane with redundant pop out controls for stuff that was previously in the menu bar, they just failed to universally integrate it with the system so that third parties could use it.
- bitcurious 3y ago
  Hidden bar has the added benefit of not asking to record your screen, an insane thing to consent to for this very basic bit of functionality.
- onnimonni 3y ago
  > Well then you're in luck, because there's a free app called Hidden Bar[1] on the Mac App Store that allows you to hide icons which you're not interested in. Author here: I did try Hidden Bar yesterday before finding this workaround and I uninstalled it today. I want to see all of the 16 apps that I have. I don't want to hide any of them. By changing the whitespace mentioned in the blog post I now can see all of them.
jeroenhd 3y ago
I can understand the sentiment. It's not necessarily something against independent developers, it's anger about a problem that shouldn't happen in the first place to a device this expensive. Windows had a similar problem with its notifications tray growing to unreasonable size, and they fixed that back in Windows Vista, after applying some auto-hiding algorithm in versions before that. Apple missing this problem or not being able to come up with a solution is simply not believable, this has to be the result of them simply not caring or refusing to address the issue for stylistic reasons. I'm sure Bartender is great software (even without the notch problem, from what I can tell!) but Apple is the one forcing their users to pay extra for their stupid design decisions. $16 to fix a problem other operating systems fixed almost twenty years ago is a steep price to pay when you're expecting a quality laptop.
- onnimonni 3y ago
  Thanks @jeroenhd for giving me the benefit of doubt and explaining it even better than I could! My intention was definitely not to bash bartender and I need to select my words more carefully in the future. It was just the only solution I knew before yesterday for a such a simple stupid design flaw from Apple. I have nothing against Bartender or its developers. I just wish I wouldn't need to install 3rd party software to fix Apple's issues.
  - haswell 3y ago
    There was a time when I would have agreed pretty whole-heartedly with you and dismissed this as a "simple stupid design flaw". I've been writing production code for over 20 years, and the existence of solutions like Bartender is evidence that the problem can't be that hard, right? And then I became a product manager for a large suite of capabilities for which large customers would spend millions/year, and my mind changed pretty significantly. Every release, I was forced to choose the 10-15 things that we could reasonably accomplish from a list of hundreds. Many dozens of the things that we didn't do could be classified as "simple stupid design flaws". There was one of these flaws in particular that I was determined to fix when I took the role. "This makes us look stupid" I thought. It had been a gap in the product for years, and I always marveled at the fact that no one had fixed it. But the reality was, the product was architected to be extensible, and to allow 3rd party developers to build their own solutions. And in this case, there were numerous solutions in the community that solved the problem quite well. When faced with the reality of a mile-long backlog, and many of those items having no solution at all, and no affordance for developers to solve them, the already-solved design flaw always fell below the cut line for each release, despite my best efforts to prioritize it. And I begrudgingly had to acknowledge that this was the right choice at the time. I have a slightly different view on these types of issues now. It's easy to call this a design flaw, but on the flip side, Apple has clearly made it possible for the community to solve this issue. I'm 100% positive someone at Apple is trying their hardest to get this thing fixed, but most likely keeps getting thwarted by more critical issues, and the realities of managing a large and complex platform/ecosystem. "Apple has all the money; they should just scale up the dev team". And if they did, those new devs would be assigned to the next 10-15 items on that mile-long list that are still more important than a 1st party solution to a solved problem. It does show the cracks in Apple's marketing, but it's also far more understandable and reasonable than I once would have believed. (I don't/didn't work for Apple).
pushedx 3y ago
30% or more of the cost goes directly to Apple, so there are some perverse incentives at play with such unofficial fixes.
- hannes0 3y ago
  You can purchase directly on their website or via Setapp. So, I would count this as an argument.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
  I assure you that whatever money Apple would make from this wouldn’t make a dent in even some lower-level Apple pleb’s P&L. This sort of unbound cynicism isn’t intelligent or useful. It shouldn’t be conflated with being usefully or interestingly critical.
  - lynndotpy 3y ago
    It adds up when you need to pay $25 to get per-app volume control, $20 to fix to the menu bar, $10 to get window management, etc, per seat. I don't think it's cynical to point out the perverse incentive. I think it's a useful point for discussion, especially given anyone familiar with any of the other major desktop environments (Windows, GNOME, KDE, etc.) might be surprised to learn that there's a modern desktop environment lacking these amenities.
- jlokier 3y ago
  The App Store fee is down to 15% these days*, or zero if you buy Bartender from their own website. * For entities with < $1M annual revenue.
aqme28 3y ago
“Refusing to pay for…Apple’s design decisions” makes no sense when you just spent $2000 on an Apple laptop, in order to not pay an indie dev $16
- wtetzner 3y ago
  I think the point is that you shouldn't need to spend anything extra after spending $2,000 on an Apple laptop for something Apple should have already addressed.
OJFord 3y ago
No, that's clearly not 'I should not have to pay Bartender for its work'; it's 'I should not have to find a third-party who can sell me a fix'.
coconut08 3y ago
especially considering that apple is full of poor design decisions that people have already been using third party software to compensate for. for example a lack of any form of reasonable window management that the many people use stuff like magnet or rectangle to compensate for. or the fact that mouse scroll direction and trackpad scroll direction are linked. or the fact that you can't control volume on a per app basis.
delfinom 3y ago
Handling the app icons properly due to the notch IS something that Apple should have done. It's pure idgaf incompetence on Apple's part. Their software quality has been declining the past few years in respects to macOS.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  > Their software quality has been declining the past few years in respects to macOS Was there a previous version of MacOS where this problem was solved? I remember literally running into this same problem on Macintosh System 7 when running MS Office apps that had too long menus for a PowerBook screen, there was a third party app back then as well to solve it (by replacing the "File", "Edit", etc menu names with icons to make them shorter)
lxgr 3y ago
Besides the freeware/shareware issue, I'd like to limit the number of various little tools running on my computer, often with effectively full access to my data (since software that provides that type of quality-of-life improvements for core OS functionality is often hard/impossible to sandbox). I can't even use most of these on my work Mac for the same reason (it's outright not allowed/possible by policy).
daviddever23box 3y ago
It is perfectly acceptable to provide a zero-cost, command-line focused solution to a single, specific user-interface constraint, while, at the same time, providing additional parametric insight to macOS user preferences.
sunshowers 3y ago
More than the cost, it's the fact that it's yet another app with its own updater, attack surface, etc that's a bother. (I don't know if this app has an App Store version available -- but in general, even if they are, they're often worse than the non-App Store versions.)

yardie 3y ago

Longterm Mac OS users have used tools like Onyx[0] to configure hidden system and finder settings. It's probably one of my first downloads after an OS upgrade. [0] https://titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html https://titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html

suction 3y ago
[dead]
therealmocker 3y ago
Could you share some examples of settings you customize with this tool? The description on the website seems pretty fairly broad.

josephd79 3y ago

I just use TopNotch.

speedgoose 3y ago
It's not doing what you think it does.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
Broken in Sonoma
- luuurker 3y ago
  Top Notch is working well here with 14.3.1. This app only makes the menu bar black though, so it's not really a fix for what the article complains about.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    I can’t get it to work with dynamic wallpapers. It defaults to the generic sonoma hills wallpaper.
    - luuurker 3y ago
      I use a static wallpaper, maybe that's why I don't have issues with it.

tw04 3y ago

Bartender is an app that will let you hide items/hide items in a submenu. I have no affiliation, and it just works. I’m guessing there’s something similar open source but I’ve yet to stumble across one that works as well. https://www.macbartender.com/ https://www.macbartender.com/

iAkashPaul 3y ago
HiddenBar
- neodymiumphish 3y ago
  When I open the hidden bar, they still expand "behind" the notch. What am I doing wrong?
  - evilduck 3y ago
    Nothing. HiddenBar will declutter your menu bar by hiding things but it doesn’t help with having so many menu bar items that they’re obscured by the notch like Bartender does.
    - neodymiumphish 3y ago
      Damn, ok. Thanks for the clarification.
  - iAkashPaul 3y ago
    Use this whitespace reducing config with HiddenBar for a compact menu bar icon set
DavideNL 3y ago
Yea, Bartender does its job really well… simple and stable. Would also recommend.
tanepiper 3y ago
$20 for what should have been the workaround from Apple for their design decision. I mean really, too many icons - have a widget to display the rest on click - the number of times I have to kill Alfred to get to Docker Desktop is more than I can count on one hand.

iAkashPaul 3y ago

HiddenBar is a FOSS alternative to Bartender, combined with reduced whitespace it'll be quite nice!

Erratic6576 3y ago

There’s a FOSS alternative to bartender

euroderf 3y ago
Do tell
- DarthNebo 3y ago
  HiddenBar
  - Erratic6576 3y ago
    Yessir, Thank you very much
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
Why would you drop a comment like this without saying what it is?
- Erratic6576 3y ago
  Sorry I meant to look it up on alternativeto.net but I got distracted because it would have taken me 3 seconds on my laptop. Damn mobile phones Hiddenbar. It might not be as shiny as bartender but it gets the job done

SteveAlexander 3y ago

You don't need to log out / in after trying this. You can instead restart the service that runs the menu bar. killall -KILL SystemUIServer

onnimonni 3y ago
EDIT: I tried this out and at least it didn't work for me. The whitespace did change a bit after running your command but not as much as happens when I log out and log in.

Simulacra 3y ago

I find the notch the be an utterly horrible design choice. Like the iPhone notch, it seems like a major step back in aesthetic. I found both too distracting for comfort.

lioeters 3y ago
I agree, Steve Jobs would have never accepted such a design compromise.

flohofwoe 3y ago

I really like my M1 Mac, but the notch has to be the dumbest design decision in the history of laptops :/ I would accept any design compromise for the webcam, make it grainy / low-res and put it under the display, put it at the bottom so it points up my nose, or move into a small 'corner notch' in the top-right corner so that the camera looks at me from the side ... anything really but please get rid of that stupidly oversized center notch.

bri3k 3y ago
You can change the resolution in System Settings->Displays, make it so the entire display is below the notch.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  The thing is, I really like the thin bezel, but why has the notch to be so massively big? The camera hole looks like it's just about 3..4 millimeters in diameter. PS: also looking around, there seem to be plenty of laptops with thin display bezel and no notch, if others can do it, why not Apple?
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    > PS: also looking around, there seem to be plenty of laptops with thin display bezel and no notch, if others can do it, why not Apple? Because those laptops have worse webcams. You don't have to agree with the tradeoff Apple made, in fact I don't, but I think the reasoning is pretty clear.
  - Waterluvian 3y ago
    There’s like four different things in the notch. Not just a camera. Plus some recessed screw holes to mount it. The notch feels weird, but when I try to redesign it without sacrificing features, I can’t come up with a better option. …Not that I’m a brilliant designer by any means.
    - pimanrules 3y ago

beretguy 3y ago

People need to vote with their wallets and stop buying MacBooks with a notch instead of complaining.

stewx 3y ago
IMO, complaining is probably a more effective way to get the message to Apple in this case than buying a different computer.
evilduck 3y ago
To buy a Windows laptop with a half dozen worse problems instead? Hard pass, I’ll take an even bigger notch instead please.
samatman 3y ago
Avoiding excellent hardware because of a software bug is pretty short-term thinking. I want the notch. I also want the OS to behave correctly, given the notch. That's not too much to ask, and no, it's not worth ragequitting the entire ecosystem over. YMMV on that one.
felixding 3y ago
Yes. I bought a M2 MBP because this is the only Macbook that I can find on the market which has the specs I wanted and does not have the notch. I also hate the Touch Bar, which to me is useless and annoying, but at least it doesn't look awfully ugly, like the notch.
- evilduck 3y ago
  You can change the display resolution to hide the notch on any Mac and it just makes the top bezel appear as tall as the notch is, which is about the same size as the pre-notch models. Same result, newer hardware options. I would have prefer they at least performed some Dynamic Island UI trickery with the notch when they added it, instead of it just being a quite literal notch out of the desktop that the OS seems barely aware of.

stewx 3y ago

The free app Dozer gives you the ability to move icons into a collapsible section, which also solves this problem from a different angle. https://github.com/Mortennn/Dozer https://github.com/Mortennn/Dozer

avnigo 3y ago
It doesn't look like it solves the problem. https://github.com/Mortennn/Dozer/issues/168 https://github.com/Mortennn/Dozer/issues/168

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

LaSombra 3y ago

All this added padding from the last few releases forces me to believe this is in preparation for a port to iPad or AVP. EDIT: The hardware is there, it's just a matter of getting the right UX in place.

jwr 3y ago

I don't mind the notch (I understand the reason it's there and it's a compromise), but it boggles my mind that Apple decided to just place the icons under the notch, where they aren't visible. This is a clear example of lack of dogfooding: clearly Apple executives do not use many apps, or they would have been infuriated at the stupid problem.

nottorp 3y ago
Apple executives don't have time to use computers :)
samatman 3y ago
Apple no longer lives in fear of Steve Jobs. This is just the latest brain-dead problem which would have obviously been fixed before it shipped in the face of Steve's cold fury.

Saris 3y ago

How come apple doesn't just 'jump' over the notch and keep displaying icons on the left side like android does?

xwowsersx 3y ago

This drives me nuts. I resort to quitting applications until I've removed enough that the app I'm looking for is visible again. I did use bartender for a while. I can't remember why I stopped using it.

onnimonni 3y ago
Author here: Sounds very familiar. I used this exact same "Poor Man's process" up until yesterday :D

notorandit 3y ago

The real point for me is: where were all Apple Egineers when the decision ws taken to add (or actually remove) that notch to the display? Have then been called in at all? I can hardly think that the decision came from the engineers: that would not solve any technical problem or add any extra technical feature. Just whoes. The decision likely came from the marketing. Fancy and stylish decisions (the nothces) on engineered stuff (the Mac) should require the former to beg the latter for a go/no go badge. I think you can put a camera in any of the 4 corners in a bezel, you can put it (back) in the middle of the upper bezel, maybe in the middle of the lower bezel. Or ask you Apple fans to use their iPhone as a camera. Look at where they put cameras in a Tesla. Not where it is nice, but where it is effective under all the points of vieew. To me the notch is totally useless also in my phone as it doesn't add anything. It rather makes some of my screen real estate unavailable. Just to get a slimmer bezel which is not a useful feature. I would rather sacrify some of the bezel to get back my perfectly rectagular display without any rounded corners (another pesky marketing-driven decision) or nothces. Meh!

tiltowait 3y ago
While I doubt anyone at Apple wants to keep the notch forever, I imagine the engineers justified the notch as adding screen real estate, and rightly so. The display's size ratio is 1728:1117, which is slightly taller than the 16:10 of the older displays—taller by exactly the size of the notch, in fact. So while it's a bit unsightly, it does serve the functional purpose of allowing them to raise the "ears" of the monitor about the size of the menu bar[1]. Prior to owning this Mac, I always set the menu bar to autohide, which wasn't the greatest UX but gave me some extra screen space. Now I can keep the same space and have the menu bar always visible. Seems like a win to me. [1] Yes, they could have just made the top bezel bigger and had no notch, but that would have have meant having a smaller screen or a larger footprint for the laptop. I don't like the notch one bit, but I think they made the correct choice.
- noqc 3y ago
  >I think they made the correct choice. Do you understand how much harder layout is when its not on a rectangle?

dorianmariefr 3y ago

You can kill "Core" processes if you don't want to log out/log in

onnimonni 3y ago
Author here: Can you test this and share a working one-liner? I will happy to add it into the blog post. I tried few commands like this but they didn't work consistently for me.
- dorianmariefr 3y ago
  ps -A | grep Core | awk '{ print $1 }' | xargs kill -9 I usually use dorian-each gem

luuurker 3y ago

I've been using Bartender since before the notch because often the space isn't enough. This is something macOS needs to handle better. The notch itself only removed some space, but the problem was already there.

Tagbert 3y ago

This is a “problem” that existed before the notch was born and has been fixed with Bartender (and clones) for several years now. Anyone with lots of app icons would run into situations where the icons would not all fit on the menu bar. Bartender gave us control and helped reduce the clutter. The problem didn’t start with the notch, it just made it more likely that someone would run into it.

jonhohle 3y ago

As the author of a current and many past Menu Extras, holy crap! Why would anyone have so many menu bar apps!

eitally 3y ago
I don't have that many, but they can definitely add up. On my work machine, where we have a need to provision multiple VPN options for technical staff working on client projects, I have menu bar icons for 3 VPNs, not to mention SentinelOne, Cylance, and CarbonBlack... and Google Drive Sync, and then a few others for software I've installed.
lemming 3y ago
I find that I only have a couple, but I have a lot of system services in the menu bar. I currently have (apart from time/date): siri, control centre, the user switcher, wifi, battery, bluetooth, music, volume, spotlight, time machine and keyboard layout. Some of those show up by default, and some I had to turn on (bluetooth, keyboard layout). But that's all just default system stuff. I have only 3 custom apps, and the next one will go behind the notch by the look of it.

nerdjon 3y ago

The large amount of white place has been driving me insane for a while, glad to see there is a fix I will need to check this out later. But I don't understand why Apple did not take a page out of Windows's taskbar. If there are too many make a dropdown. They are already easily draggable and removable so concern about bloat isn't really a concern. If I have them there I want them there and accessible.

bloblaw 3y ago

The open-source Hidden Bar is my current solution to this problem, but I think I prefer this native fix. https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden brew install --cask hiddenbar

aeturnum 3y ago

> * I discovered a free, native macOS solution that doesn't require installing Bartender or any other additional apps.* > You can adjust the values from 0 to 6 to accommodate even more icons. Personally, I found 6 to be a good fit. It's ultimately a really petty point - but this is not a fix. This increases the number of apps on the top bar before the problem occurs. Bartender (and hidden[1] - which I discovered in this thread) fix the problem. Calling a technique that delays the problem "a solution" after sneering at a project that actually is a solution just rubs me the wrong way. Edit: Though I'll leave my rude comment in its original form, it's also important to note that OP added a note clarifying this may not fix the problem for everyone in what I thought was a mature reaction to a petty complaint. [1] https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden

onnimonni 3y ago
You're correct that there are certain scenarios that won't be addressed by this. Would it be more fair to say to write that this will only postpone the issue? To offer a counterexample, I've been using my machine for slightly over a year now, and the number of applications running in the menu bar have stabilized to 16 apps. So this undeniably resolves the issue on my machine and for my usage. EDIT: I think this was a great point and I added a notice section to the blog post so that everyone using this hack will be well informed to make best decisions. Thanks for the feedback!
- aeturnum 3y ago
  I appreciate you taking my very petty feedback! I totally agree that it's a clever change that will allow most people to avoid the problem.
  - onnimonni 3y ago
    I really appreciate your original comment and it was straight to the point. It's probably good to still reflect about that part since other users might feel offended. Thanks also for the EDIT part too. It makes me feel that HN users won't tolerate bullshit but will nonetheless give great feedback :) Your comment original comment lead me to ask if HN admins could rephrase the blog article from: "Native macOS fix for applications hiding under the MacBook Pro notch" -> "Built-in MacOS workaround for applications hiding under the MacBook Pro notch" Which is more accurately representing the contents of the article. I also changed the title in my own blog post to this already.

neither_color 3y ago

I found an alternative solution: the application Easyres, a little app that lets you change resolutions from the menu bar, has an alternative resolution that's about 30-40px shorter than the standard resolution. This gives you back the whole menu bar as it sits below the notch. It's a much cleaner look. The notch completely disappears and you forget it ever existed.

swozey 3y ago
I use bartender and try to keep the right side of my menu pretty light on taskbar stuff. I think I do lose a few things on my 14" but anything critical I want in 1 click is on the far right and visible.

klaushardt 3y ago

I just dump my default changes here. Maybe somebody finds something usefull for themself. Added the command from this thread too. :) Edit: Looks like i already did edit this before since mine was already at 8 and 12. Added the original source like its linked above. # Defaults and other Stuff sudo scutil --set HostName nix # https://macos-defaults.com/ defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSNavPanelExpandedStateForSaveMode -bool true defaults write NSGlobalDomain PMPrintingExpandedStateForPrint -bool true defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false defaults write com.apple.dock "autohide-delay" -float "0" && killall Dock defaults write com.apple.dock "autohide-time-modifier" -float "0.3" && killall Dock defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowScrollBars -string "Always"; killall Finder defaults write com.apple.screencapture "disable-shadow" -bool "true" defaults write com.apple.dock "tilesize" -int "38" && killall Dock defaults write com.apple.dock "mineffect" -string "scale" && killall Dock defaults write com.apple.finder "ShowExternalHardDrivesOnDesktop" -bool "false" && killall Finder defaults write com.apple.finder "ShowRemovableMediaOnDesktop" -bool "false" && killall Finder defaults write com.apple.dock "mru-spaces" -bool "false" && killall Dock defaults write com.apple.TimeMachine "DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup" -bool "true" defaults write com.apple.dock "enable-spring-load-actions-on-all-items" -bool "true" && killall Dock defaults write com.apple.Music "userWantsPlaybackNotifications" -bool "false" && killall Music # https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2023/12/16/macbook-notch-and-menu-bar-fixes/ # https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/16lpfg5/hidden_preference_to_alter_the_menubar_spacing/ # https://flaky.build/native-fix-for-applications-hiding-under-the-macbook-pro-notch # https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39343919 defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 8 defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 12 # https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/16ra8di/metal_hud_enabledisable_shortcut/ # https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/1271048e407543d391415934cad5edcd defaults write -g MetalForceHudEnabled -bool YES /bin/launchctl setenv MTL_HUD_ENABLED 1

onnimonni 3y ago

Author here: @dang other users here helped me to understand that the title is bit misleading. I was just eager to share about this and possibly help others with this knowledge without thinking about this correctly. I already renamed the article on my end and redirected it to a new url: https://flaky.build/built-in-workaround-for-applications-hiding-under-the-macbook-pro-notch https://flaky.build/built-in-workaround-for-applications-hid... Can you change the url and rename the submission title to: "Built-in MacOS workaround for applications hiding under the MacBook Pro notch" Thanks a lot and sorry for the trouble!

miles 3y ago

Here is the apparent origin post of this undocumented preference: Hidden preference to alter the menubar spacing https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/16lpfg5/hidden_preference_to_alter_the_menubar_spacing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/16lpfg5/hidden_prefe... The author describes tracing Bartender's activity to hunt down the method. And this blog post mentions higher values than 6 (recommending 12 for NSStatusItemSpacing and 8 for NSStatusItemSelectionPadding): How to fix Mac menu bar icons hidden by the MacBook notch https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2023/12/16/macbook-notch-and-menu-bar-fixes/ https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2023/12/16/macbook-notch-a...

icodestuff 3y ago

The notch is what it is: a compromise between webcam quality, branding, and thin bezels. But it’s hard to argue but that Apple’s software integration with it is mediocre at best. None of the extra space is usable except by anything but the awkwardly tall menu bar and the status items or menu extras it holds, and the system not being aware of the notch —sometimes— like letting status items pile up underneath, or being able to put the mouse pointer underneath it but not when a mouse button is held down (this behavior was removed in a late version of Ventura), or putting the picture-in-picture window partially underneath the menu bar (like it expects only a regular-sized menu bar to be there)… is symptomatic of a larger quality and integration problem at Apple, I think.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

actinium226 3y ago

I was hoping this article would show how you could make fullscreen apps actually fullscreen. It bothers me that the top of the app sits below the notch - there are some apps where there's nothing in the top middle that the notch would cover, and the apps would benefit from a little bit of extra real estate. Oh well, we wait and hope someone figures it out.

627467 3y ago

Hey, I love to bash appl like anybody else, and this notch issue is an equivalent dumb outcome as the magic mouse charging like a dead cockroach or the "you're holding the phone wrong". But my main concern is how EVERY Mac app nowadays feels the need to leave an icon on the "tray" leading to this problem in the first place. Notch or no notch, this pattern just doesn't scale. Am I the only one installing apps to hide the trays icons? On windows this hiding pattern come as default for years.

croemer 3y ago

Original source of this hack is: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/465674/330523 https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/465674/330523 I recommend upvoting (and favoriting) to make it more findable in the future (including my future self).

onnimonni 3y ago
Author here: This link is also mentioned in the sources section of the article and I did personally upvote that answer too in Stack Exchange.
- croemer 3y ago
  Thanks for discovering that answer, improving on it (with screenshots) and sharing it on your blog which made it pop up here! My comment isn't a slight at all, it's just much easier (for me at least) to rediscover useful StackOverflow answers (by favoriting them) than to find a blog post.