8 ms·

Every time I get a new Mac, I run these commands to reduce the spacing between menu bar icons. Lets you fit at least 2x the number of items in the menu bar. ``

by corlinp 6mo ago

Every time I get a new Mac, I run these commands to reduce the spacing between menu bar icons. Lets you fit at least 2x the number of items in the menu bar. ``` defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 2 defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 2 ```

potatocoffee 6mo ago
This is so much better, thank you for this.
swiftcoder 6mo ago
Dude. How am I only just learning this? This needs to be plastered loudly over the internet
richardlblair 6mo ago
This was always my biggest gripe about using a mac, the OS that "just works". I ended up a bunch of commands I had to run and a stack of apps I needed to install for it to feel usable.
- freedomben 6mo ago
  And for years and years when in discussions about Linux vs Mac, Linux was always slammed as having to be customized and "user's should never have to use the terminal" . (I agree with that, but even in 2014 I remember having to run terminal commands to tweak stuff to make it work more like I wanted to)
  - richardlblair 6mo ago
    Ironically I ended up on linux. Windows went to crap, and I figured if I have to run a bunch of scripts to make my OS usable I may as well just use linux. Honestly, I couldn't be happier. I get so much more out of my hardware and I enjoy the experience so much more.
    - bigfudge 6mo ago
      On a laptop? I’m interested but have never found sleep/wake and battery life to ever remotely approach osx and a Mac.
      - freedomben 6mo ago
        Many Lenovos and Dells work pretty well. I use a frame.work laptop and it continually gets better. It's not flawless, but personally I accept that the many benefits of using Linux will come with some tradeoffs. To me it's very worth it. Great battery life and flawless sleep/wake on my macbook weren't worth the inferior (IMHO) UX of macos. If you really care about those things, there are some good resources out there (including a good community of frame.work people).
- sosborn 6mo ago
  TBF - It still does "just work," The fact that it doesn't completely fit into your (and my) preferences doesn't really change that, and if that's the standard, then everything will fall short of it.
  - oaweoifjwpo 6mo ago
    If the icons are just hidden and you can't find them in order to use the programs you have running, that's not "just working". That's broken functionality. Windows has solved this with the overflow menu for literally decades.
    - quietsegfault 6mo ago
      I have never seen anyone with enough menu bar icons to have them hide, nor have I known anyone who ran into that problem. It’s a bug that should be fixed, but I just don’t think it’s as big of a deal as it’s made out to be.
      - oaweoifjwpo 6mo ago
        Just because you have never personally seen a bug occur doesn't mean it isn't a problem. This very article is about how Tailscale frequently gets reports of them being hidden. And I personally have had the icons hidden. My work laptop has a lot of stuff running on it (much of it is mandatory: VPN, custom company processes, Google Drive, etc) and combined with my personal preferred programs (f.lux, etc) it occasionally hits the limit and goes under the notch.
      - Kaliboy 6mo ago
        Did we read the same article? It literally drove them to create a new application.
        oaweoifjwpo 6mo ago
        This is the fairly standard Apple defensework where "it just works, but if it doesn't work it's probably not a real problem" despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.
- inopinatus 6mo ago
  That phrase "just works" speaks more to vertical integration than it does to any more specific claim about UX, alignment to preferences, or immediate productivity, and to demonstrate how foundationally this is encoded, you implicitly alluded as much in that opening phrase "a mac, the OS" that directly conflated the hardware and the software. Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing around with drivers. Not out of any blinkered misconceptions about quality, usability, or an otiose love for Apple or their products otherwise.
  - longislandguido 6mo ago
    > Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing around with drivers All Windows laptops come preinstalled, there's no arsing about with drivers there either. Unless you install the bare OS from scratch. Apple bundles the drivers for their hardware with their OS. Good luck with plugging in anything non-Apple branded or not using standard USB audio or Ethernet CDC and you're 100% having to muck about with sketchy kexts that almost certainly will break in the next OS release. You can do this for Windows too, that's how most corporate images are built. One image and 30 different laptop models, that's how it's done in every competently run megacorp IT department. Do you think some poor technician is manually loading drivers onto every Windows laptop?
    - JSR_FDED 6mo ago
      > you're 100% having to muck about with sketchy kexts Apple has replaced kexts (kernel extensions) with a user-space alternative for many years now
      - dddddaviddddd 6mo ago
        Hence > that almost certainly will break in the next OS release My scanner has drivers available for download that date from 2015 with no updates since then.
        longislandguido 6mo ago
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- al_borland 6mo ago
  The users who run into issues with menubar space would probably be well served to question if they really need all that stuff. The people with the most stuff up there tend to be the same ones who are always complaining about system slowness or weird issues... because they have 2 dozen utilities running in the background that they don't consider, which are all looking for CPU time or trying to change the default behavior of the OS in conflicting ways. My goal is genially not to have anything running in the menubar that isn't out of the box from the OS. I had a similar desire with the system tray on Windows (though it was more difficult on Windows due to some hardware requiring it). Work is the only place I have an issue, because they install a bunch of security agents that all want a spot in the menubar, even though they never need me to interact with them or know what they're doing. Those agents sitting up in the menubar tend to be the reason my system has slow downs or issues. Though the slowdowns have gone away since moving to M1. On Intel my fan used to run all the time. Now I'm just left with the weird issues they cause.
  - lxgr 6mo ago
    Ah, got it, I’m holding it wrong. > My goal is genially not to have anything running in the menubar that isn't out of the box from the OS. My goal is to use the apps I want to use, and if they are exclusively menu bar apps, what can I do about that? > The people with the most stuff up there tend to be the same ones who are always complaining about system slowness The cause for system slowness on my mac are too many browser tabs eating 500 MB memory each, not a few 10 MB native Swift apps.
    - UqWBcuFx6NV4r 6mo ago
      [flagged]
      - Nevermark 6mo ago
        Empty advice like "you should want what I want, because here is how it works for me", benefits from pushback. Another common one: responding to a commenter's device or OS problem by suggesting a platform switch. Despite the massive number of unrelated tradeoffs such a decision would involve. And of course, the pedantic "well, it always works for me" or "really, that should work", chime-in non-advice to just not have the problem in the first place. It is tautologically effective, but ...
- corlinp 6mo ago
  When I set up a Mac I have a short list of things that I need to install. When I set up Windows I have a much longer list of things that I need to un-install. I much prefer the former.
  - daveidol 6mo ago
    Well said!
  - TheDong 6mo ago
    And when I setup nixos, I have a single command which installs/configures everything. Windows isn't the alternative if you're on hacker news, OpenBSD and linux are the alternatives.
    - miki123211 6mo ago
      To me, it's the difference between caring about productivity and caring about improving productivity. If you care about productivity and want your computer to "just work", install stock Mac OS (with maybe a utility or two), and you don't have to worry about anything for the next 3 or so years. If you want to constantly fiddle with configs and spend hours just so things work exactly the way you want them to, sure, go with a BSD or whatever. No judgment either way, this is a hobby like any other. Some people like to paint, some people like assembling model airplanes, others like building their oS from source and making sure the window is exactly the shade of blue they want it to be. Nothing wrong with any of the three.
  - VerifiedReports 6mo ago
    Whataboutism
- rafaelmn 6mo ago
  You expect someone to ship you an OS personalized to your taste and preferences ?
  - jazzypants 6mo ago
    This should clearly be editable in a GUI somewhere.
- drdaeman 6mo ago
  nix-darwin solves a lot of those pains. Not all of them, but it makes initial setup a lot simpler and faster.
- alsetmusic 6mo ago
  I'd argue that for most people, the system defaults are fine. They don't have GUI controls / preferences for most of the stuff that power users and the HN crowd might need. However, they provide a path for people at those levels with CLI commands. I think it's a fair balance. If you're running a bajillion things that add menu icons and you don't also care about computers enough to want to learn more, that's probably pretty frustrating. Most of the people I've met who care a lot about custom software have been curious about going further. Small sample size, just my two cents.
- saagarjha 6mo ago
  Be glad that you have options at all. They could have not put them in user defaults
- oneeyedpigeon 6mo ago
  I just wish we could get these settings in nice plain text files so we can version control them and edit them easily.
827a 6mo ago
[dead]
HaloZero 6mo ago
Hmmm, is this supposed to do something on OSX 26.3? I tried setting it to 10 and it doesn't seem to do anything? Wonder if there's something new for Tahoe.
- miketery 6mo ago
  $ killall ControlCenter
- swiftcoder 6mo ago
  If you log out/in or reboot it will take effect. Previously killing SystemUI server was enough to restart the menu bar, but that doesn't seem to do the trick anymore.
galkk 6mo ago
Thank you! Do you have anything else as useful as this? THis is perfect
- corlinp 6mo ago
  Well I suppose I can't miss out on the opportunity to plug my open-source menu bar app for voice-to-text in any app! Going on three years of development, believe it or not. https://github.com/corlinp/voibe https://github.com/corlinp/voibe
dwg 6mo ago
what are the default values, in case someone wants to restore them?
- hn111 6mo ago
  You can use `delete` instead of `write`: defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing
hagendaasalpine 6mo ago
with nix-darwin you can declare that config: system.defaults.NSGlobalDomain = { NSStatusItemSpacing = 2; NSStatusItemSelectionPadding = 2; };
zhongwei2049 6mo ago
Been using this trick for a while. It's wild that this isn't exposed in System Settings somewhere. macOS basically treats third-party menu bar apps as second-class citizens and then acts surprised when users are confused.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
e40 6mo ago
My only gripe, it only seems to apply to the macOS items. The ones put there by apps still seem to be spaced out the same as before. The macOS ones are definitely closer.

by corlinp 6mo ago

potatocoffee 6mo ago

This is so much better, thank you for this.

swiftcoder 6mo ago

Dude. How am I only just learning this? This needs to be plastered loudly over the internet

richardlblair 6mo ago

This was always my biggest gripe about using a mac, the OS that "just works". I ended up a bunch of commands I had to run and a stack of apps I needed to install for it to feel usable.

freedomben 6mo ago
And for years and years when in discussions about Linux vs Mac, Linux was always slammed as having to be customized and "user's should never have to use the terminal" . (I agree with that, but even in 2014 I remember having to run terminal commands to tweak stuff to make it work more like I wanted to)
- richardlblair 6mo ago
  Ironically I ended up on linux. Windows went to crap, and I figured if I have to run a bunch of scripts to make my OS usable I may as well just use linux. Honestly, I couldn't be happier. I get so much more out of my hardware and I enjoy the experience so much more.
  - bigfudge 6mo ago
    On a laptop? I’m interested but have never found sleep/wake and battery life to ever remotely approach osx and a Mac.
    - freedomben 6mo ago
      Many Lenovos and Dells work pretty well. I use a frame.work laptop and it continually gets better. It's not flawless, but personally I accept that the many benefits of using Linux will come with some tradeoffs. To me it's very worth it. Great battery life and flawless sleep/wake on my macbook weren't worth the inferior (IMHO) UX of macos. If you really care about those things, there are some good resources out there (including a good community of frame.work people).
sosborn 6mo ago
TBF - It still does "just work," The fact that it doesn't completely fit into your (and my) preferences doesn't really change that, and if that's the standard, then everything will fall short of it.
- oaweoifjwpo 6mo ago
  If the icons are just hidden and you can't find them in order to use the programs you have running, that's not "just working". That's broken functionality. Windows has solved this with the overflow menu for literally decades.
  - quietsegfault 6mo ago
    I have never seen anyone with enough menu bar icons to have them hide, nor have I known anyone who ran into that problem. It’s a bug that should be fixed, but I just don’t think it’s as big of a deal as it’s made out to be.
    - oaweoifjwpo 6mo ago
      Just because you have never personally seen a bug occur doesn't mean it isn't a problem. This very article is about how Tailscale frequently gets reports of them being hidden. And I personally have had the icons hidden. My work laptop has a lot of stuff running on it (much of it is mandatory: VPN, custom company processes, Google Drive, etc) and combined with my personal preferred programs (f.lux, etc) it occasionally hits the limit and goes under the notch.
    - Kaliboy 6mo ago
      Did we read the same article? It literally drove them to create a new application.
      - oaweoifjwpo 6mo ago
        This is the fairly standard Apple defensework where "it just works, but if it doesn't work it's probably not a real problem" despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.
inopinatus 6mo ago
That phrase "just works" speaks more to vertical integration than it does to any more specific claim about UX, alignment to preferences, or immediate productivity, and to demonstrate how foundationally this is encoded, you implicitly alluded as much in that opening phrase "a mac, the OS" that directly conflated the hardware and the software. Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing around with drivers. Not out of any blinkered misconceptions about quality, usability, or an otiose love for Apple or their products otherwise.
- longislandguido 6mo ago
  > Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing around with drivers All Windows laptops come preinstalled, there's no arsing about with drivers there either. Unless you install the bare OS from scratch. Apple bundles the drivers for their hardware with their OS. Good luck with plugging in anything non-Apple branded or not using standard USB audio or Ethernet CDC and you're 100% having to muck about with sketchy kexts that almost certainly will break in the next OS release. You can do this for Windows too, that's how most corporate images are built. One image and 30 different laptop models, that's how it's done in every competently run megacorp IT department. Do you think some poor technician is manually loading drivers onto every Windows laptop?
  - JSR_FDED 6mo ago
    > you're 100% having to muck about with sketchy kexts Apple has replaced kexts (kernel extensions) with a user-space alternative for many years now
    - dddddaviddddd 6mo ago
      Hence > that almost certainly will break in the next OS release My scanner has drivers available for download that date from 2015 with no updates since then.
      - longislandguido 6mo ago
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
al_borland 6mo ago
The users who run into issues with menubar space would probably be well served to question if they really need all that stuff. The people with the most stuff up there tend to be the same ones who are always complaining about system slowness or weird issues... because they have 2 dozen utilities running in the background that they don't consider, which are all looking for CPU time or trying to change the default behavior of the OS in conflicting ways. My goal is genially not to have anything running in the menubar that isn't out of the box from the OS. I had a similar desire with the system tray on Windows (though it was more difficult on Windows due to some hardware requiring it). Work is the only place I have an issue, because they install a bunch of security agents that all want a spot in the menubar, even though they never need me to interact with them or know what they're doing. Those agents sitting up in the menubar tend to be the reason my system has slow downs or issues. Though the slowdowns have gone away since moving to M1. On Intel my fan used to run all the time. Now I'm just left with the weird issues they cause.
- lxgr 6mo ago
  Ah, got it, I’m holding it wrong. > My goal is genially not to have anything running in the menubar that isn't out of the box from the OS. My goal is to use the apps I want to use, and if they are exclusively menu bar apps, what can I do about that? > The people with the most stuff up there tend to be the same ones who are always complaining about system slowness The cause for system slowness on my mac are too many browser tabs eating 500 MB memory each, not a few 10 MB native Swift apps.
  - UqWBcuFx6NV4r 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Nevermark 6mo ago
      Empty advice like "you should want what I want, because here is how it works for me", benefits from pushback. Another common one: responding to a commenter's device or OS problem by suggesting a platform switch. Despite the massive number of unrelated tradeoffs such a decision would involve. And of course, the pedantic "well, it always works for me" or "really, that should work", chime-in non-advice to just not have the problem in the first place. It is tautologically effective, but ...
corlinp 6mo ago
When I set up a Mac I have a short list of things that I need to install. When I set up Windows I have a much longer list of things that I need to un-install. I much prefer the former.
- daveidol 6mo ago
  Well said!
- TheDong 6mo ago
  And when I setup nixos, I have a single command which installs/configures everything. Windows isn't the alternative if you're on hacker news, OpenBSD and linux are the alternatives.
  - miki123211 6mo ago
    To me, it's the difference between caring about productivity and caring about improving productivity. If you care about productivity and want your computer to "just work", install stock Mac OS (with maybe a utility or two), and you don't have to worry about anything for the next 3 or so years. If you want to constantly fiddle with configs and spend hours just so things work exactly the way you want them to, sure, go with a BSD or whatever. No judgment either way, this is a hobby like any other. Some people like to paint, some people like assembling model airplanes, others like building their oS from source and making sure the window is exactly the shade of blue they want it to be. Nothing wrong with any of the three.
- VerifiedReports 6mo ago
  Whataboutism
rafaelmn 6mo ago
You expect someone to ship you an OS personalized to your taste and preferences ?
- jazzypants 6mo ago
  This should clearly be editable in a GUI somewhere.
drdaeman 6mo ago
nix-darwin solves a lot of those pains. Not all of them, but it makes initial setup a lot simpler and faster.
alsetmusic 6mo ago
I'd argue that for most people, the system defaults are fine. They don't have GUI controls / preferences for most of the stuff that power users and the HN crowd might need. However, they provide a path for people at those levels with CLI commands. I think it's a fair balance. If you're running a bajillion things that add menu icons and you don't also care about computers enough to want to learn more, that's probably pretty frustrating. Most of the people I've met who care a lot about custom software have been curious about going further. Small sample size, just my two cents.
saagarjha 6mo ago
Be glad that you have options at all. They could have not put them in user defaults
oneeyedpigeon 6mo ago
I just wish we could get these settings in nice plain text files so we can version control them and edit them easily.

827a 6mo ago

[dead]

HaloZero 6mo ago

Hmmm, is this supposed to do something on OSX 26.3? I tried setting it to 10 and it doesn't seem to do anything? Wonder if there's something new for Tahoe.

miketery 6mo ago
$ killall ControlCenter
swiftcoder 6mo ago
If you log out/in or reboot it will take effect. Previously killing SystemUI server was enough to restart the menu bar, but that doesn't seem to do the trick anymore.

galkk 6mo ago

Thank you! Do you have anything else as useful as this? THis is perfect

corlinp 6mo ago
Well I suppose I can't miss out on the opportunity to plug my open-source menu bar app for voice-to-text in any app! Going on three years of development, believe it or not. https://github.com/corlinp/voibe https://github.com/corlinp/voibe

dwg 6mo ago

what are the default values, in case someone wants to restore them?

hn111 6mo ago
You can use `delete` instead of `write`: defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing

hagendaasalpine 6mo ago

with nix-darwin you can declare that config: system.defaults.NSGlobalDomain = { NSStatusItemSpacing = 2; NSStatusItemSelectionPadding = 2; };

zhongwei2049 6mo ago

Been using this trick for a while. It's wild that this isn't exposed in System Settings somewhere. macOS basically treats third-party menu bar apps as second-class citizens and then acts surprised when users are confused.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

e40 6mo ago

My only gripe, it only seems to apply to the macOS items. The ones put there by apps still seem to be spaced out the same as before. The macOS ones are definitely closer.