{"id":12376,"date":"2026-05-23T00:46:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T23:46:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/innovatenews.site\/index.php\/2026\/05\/23\/how-to-stop-menu-bar-items-being-hidden-behind-the-macbook-pro-notch\/"},"modified":"2026-05-23T00:46:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T23:46:16","slug":"how-to-stop-menu-bar-items-being-hidden-behind-the-macbook-pro-notch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/innovatenews.site\/index.php\/2026\/05\/23\/how-to-stop-menu-bar-items-being-hidden-behind-the-macbook-pro-notch\/","title":{"rendered":"How to stop menu bar items being hidden behind the MacBook Pro notch"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The topic How to stop menu bar items being hidden behind the MacBook Pro notch<\/strong> is currently the subject of lively discussion \u2014 readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.<\/p>\n

This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies\u2019 decisions and competitors\u2019 reactions can quickly change the picture.<\/p>\n

I am sometimes astonished that a company built on the notion of prioritizing the user experience is still capable of allowing some absurd UI oversights to remain unfixed through countless macOS generations.<\/p>\n

One of the most absurd examples to me is the fact that menu bar items can end up being hidden behind the MacBook Pro notch \u2026<\/p>\n

Steve Jobs famously said that what was needed was to start from the user experience, then work backwards to the technologies. There are a huge number of ways in which Apple lives up to this goal. However, there are also some truly remarkable oversights which are somehow allowed to persist from macOS generation to macOS generation.<\/p>\n

An extremely long-standing one is a bug with Spaces where, after a restart, apps will either end up on the wrong desktop or will claim to be set to show on all desktops but in fact won\u2019t do so. Sometimes a window will be essentially inaccessible altogether by being trapped between desktops. This bug has persisted for so many years that I\u2019m firmly convinced nobody at Apple Park uses Spaces, otherwise, I simply cannot understand why it wouldn\u2019t have been fixed.<\/p>\n

Another eye-opening one is the way that menu items can end up being hidden behind the MacBook Pro notch, with Apple seemingly unaware or unconcerned about this. I typically only have four or five third-party menu bar items on screen at any given point (albeit including a wider timezone clock one), and yet it is still very common for one of them to end up invisible.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, there is a simple solution to this by reducing the spacing between menu bar items. This is achieved using two terminal commands. The default spacing between items is 16 and I reduced it to eight. This is still perfectly usable, but is easily reversed if you don\u2019t like the result.<\/p>\n

Note that due to the way that WordPress displays pre-formatted text, you may not see the entire lines, but you can copy and paste them. As you shouldn\u2019t ever paste any text into terminal that you can\u2019t fully see, and my advice doesn\u2019t change just because I am the source, my suggestion is that you paste it into Notes first and then into terminal from there once you have seen it for yourself.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll need to log out and log in again to activate it. You can try other numbers to vary the spacing.<\/p>\n