How to prevent menu bar items from being hidden behind the MacBook Pro notch

I’m sometimes amazed that a company built on the notion of prioritizing user experience is still able to allow some absurd UI oversights to go uncorrected across countless generations of macOS.

One of the most absurd examples for me is the fact that menu bar items can end up being hidden behind the MacBook Pro notch…

Steve Jobs said you have to start from user experience and then go back to technology. There are many ways Apple can achieve this goal. However, there are also some truly notable oversights that can persist from one macOS generation to the next.

An extremely old bug is a bug with Spaces where, after a restart, applications will end up on the wrong desktop or pretend to be configured to show on all desktops, but in fact won’t. Sometimes a window will be completely inaccessible because it is stuck between desks. This bug has persisted for so many years that I’m firmly convinced that no one at Apple Park uses Spaces, otherwise I just don’t understand why it wouldn’t have been fixed.

Another telling element is how menu items can end up hidden behind the MacBook Pro’s notch, with Apple seemingly oblivious or indifferent about it. Typically, I only have four or five third-party menu bar items on screen at any given time (even if it’s a wider time zone), and yet it’s still very common for one of them to end up invisible.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution to this problem: reduce the spacing between menu bar items. This is achieved using two terminal commands. The default spacing between elements is 16 and I reduced it to eight. This is still perfectly usable, but can be easily reversed if you don’t like the result.

Note that because of the way WordPress displays preformatted text, you may not see the entire lines, but you can copy and paste them. Since you should never paste text into a terminal that you can’t see entirely, and my advice doesn’t change just because I’m the source, my suggestion is to paste it into Notes first, then into the terminal from there once you’ve seen it for yourself.

To halve the spacing:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 8 defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 8

You will need to log out and log back in to activate it. You can try other numbers to vary the spacing.

To return to the default:

defaults -currentHost remove -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 8 defaults -currentHost remove -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 8

Is this useful to you? Please let us know in the comments.