You’ve probably been using your Mac system for quite a while, but do you know how to customize what’s on your Menu Bar along the top? Here’s a primer with everything you need to know so you can customize it perfectly.
It’s fairly obvious how to customize the Dock in MacOS: Control-click on the vertical divider bar and the primary options all appear in a little menu. Do the same on an individual app icon and you can choose to have it stay in the Dock even when it’s not running. Reasonably straightforward. But the menu bar along the top? That’s a bit more complicated because the icons that appear come from a variety of different sources.
Many are related to applications and helper utilities you might be running, some can be hidden, and some are from MacOS itself. There’s also a menubar button to bring up the Control Center and another one (typically the date and time) that brings up the Notification Center. Suffice to say, it’s a busy spot!
Shortcuts: Menu Bar Icons | System Shortcuts | Customize in Settings | Battery & Clock
Most people I see running Mac systems seem to have no idea that they can customize the menu bar, however, so it tends to be crammed full of icons for apps and utilities that they might forget they’re even running. The result: You learn to ignore all of these handy shortcuts instead of customizing the menu bar. Let’s fix that.
MENU BAR ICONS IN MACOS
I admit, I have a lot of utilities running on my primary Mac system, a MacBook Pro running MacOS 15.3 Sequoia:
That’s just the right side of the menu bar: The left side tends to be app-specific menus, plus the Apple icon for system options. It’s a lot of icons, and it’s understandable if you have a similar amount that you might forget what they all do.
Going from the right edge to the left, the date and time display is from MacOS and can be tweaked to your liking, as I’ll show momentarily. Click on the date/time and the Notification Center pops up. Click again and it’s hidden. This is the same with the next icon over, the two “switches” stacked one atop the other: That’s the Control Center.
Next is the magnifying glass for Spotlight, the excellent MacOS search system. Battery display is the first that has a graphical representation of information: The icon shows a visual indication that the battery is over 50% charged. Wi-Fi is the same: With a weak signal you’d see the topmost arcs a lighter grey to denote that it’s a weak signal.
Temperature is a new feature in MacOS 15.3 and I’ve written about it here: Add Temperature to your Menu Bar. I am a big fan of this addition, personally, because it helps me know what to expect when I leave the house. 34ºF is kinda chilly!
All of the icons to the left of the weather information are unique to the apps and utilities I run. How do you know what’s what? Typically you can just click on one and a menu will appear:
In this instance, the concentric circles with the padlock are for 1Password, a popular password management application. Notice that the very last menu option is “Quit”. This is quite common and an easy way to clean up your menu bar by quitting applications. Of course, if you want to keep them running, that’s not a great solution!
Instead, sometimes applications can continue to run in the background even if you drag the icon directly off the menu bar. To try this, hold down the Control key as you drag:
If the app doesn’t know what this means, it’ll generally just snap back onto the menu bar, no harm done.
MACOS SYSTEM SHORTCUTS ON THE MENU BAR
The Mac system has a number of its own shortcuts tucked onto the menu bar and they are generally quite helpful. In fact, depending on how you have your system configured, you might have quite a few of these present. Some can be invaluable, like the Wi-Fi option that shows lots of real-time data about your network connectivity options:
Notice that my personal iPhone hotspot “iDave 15 Pro”, has four bars of connectivity to the cellular network with an “LTE” connection (as opposed to 5G, which is considerably faster) and about 50% battery. Yes, I can check my phone battery level directly from the Wi-Fi menu. Helpful, right?
The wireless icon adjacent to the known and other networks also conveys information through the number of arcs that are filled in. Weaker signals can then be ignored in favor of stronger connectivity options.
One of my favorites, however, is the Control Center, accessible with a click on the two switches icon adjacent to the date/time:
There’s a bit of redundancy with the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth options (both can be on the menu bar too), but this is a great way to efficiently change up things on your Mac too. Stage Manager, for example, is quite popular, and Screen Mirroring is essential to have second and third displays (or AirPlay) function as you desire. Notice you can also adjust brightness, sound volume, even control music playback. That’s a lotta controls!
Finally, a click on the date and time reveals the Notification Center, where you can also catch up on notifications you might have missed when you were looking away from your screen.
But can you remove these, helpful though they might be? In many cases, yes, you can.
CUSTOMIZE YOUR MENU BAR IN SETTINGS
Most of the customization of your menu bar, particularly for MacOS system utilities, is done through Settings…
Confusingly, the menu bar options are tucked into the “Control Center” settings and are now considered “Control Center Modules”. Not to worry, click on “Control Center” on the left side in Settings and you’ll reach the screen shown above. Notice that I have Wi-Fi set to “Show in Menu Bar”, Focus, Screen Mirroring, Display, and Sound set to “Show When Active”, and Bluetooth, AirDrop, and Stage Manager set to “Don’t Show in Menu Bar”. These can be changed!
To determine whether you should have them show up in the menu bar or not, just ask yourself whether you actually utilize the icon to access the shortcut menu? If not, you can probably safely hide it. These will all continue to run and be accessible through different paths (like the Control Center) even if you hide them from the Menu Bar. As an example, I still have Bluetooth working on my MacBook Pro even with the icon hidden from the menu bar.
CUSTOMIZE MENU BAR BATTERY & CLOCK
Some options are more complicated. The simple battery display in the menu bar, for example, has quite a few options (you’ll need to scroll down a bit to find this):
You’re thinking “wait, if you aren’t showing it in the Menu Bar, how are you seeing the battery there anyway?” A good question! I actually run a separate utility called AlDente that manages my battery charge to extend the life of the battery on my computer. That app is showing the information on the menu bar, as if it were the standard Mac feature.
Scroll down to the very bottom and there are a few options that are Menu Bar Only:
Again, remember that you can hide utilities like Spotlight and Time Machine from the menu bar and they’ll continue to run and function as normal. In fact, you can always pop up the Spotlight search box with Command+Space, which is how I access it.
Before we wrap up, click on “Clock Options…” to see just how much you can customize the clock on the menu bar:
There are even more options, but I’ll let you scroll further down to see what they are.
Now, with all of that in mind, go and customize the heck out of your Mac menu bar so it works perfectly for you!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about MacOS since the first release and have hundreds of helpful tutorials here on the site. Please check out my Mac help library for lots more useful content while you’re here!