It sometimes amazes me that a company built on the idea of prioritizing the user experience is still able to allow some absurd UI oversights to go unfixed through countless generations of macOS.
One of the most absurd examples to me is the fact that menu bar items can be hidden behind the notch on the MacBook Pro…
Steve Jobs famously said that what was needed was to start from the user experience and then work back to the technology. There are a myriad of ways Apple accomplishes this goal. However, there are also some really notable oversights that can somehow persist from macOS generation to macOS generation.
An extremely persistent bug is the bug in Spaces, where apps will either end up on the wrong desktop after restarting, or will claim to be set to show on all desktops, but actually won’t. Sometimes the window will be essentially completely inaccessible because it will be trapped between surfaces. This bug has persisted for so many years that I firmly believe that no one at Apple Park uses Spaces, otherwise I just don’t understand why it wouldn’t be fixed.
Another eye-opener is the way menu items can be hidden behind the MacBook Pro’s notch without Apple seemingly knowing or caring. I usually only have four or five third-party menu bar items on screen at any given time (even including a clock with 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 by reducing the spaces 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 can easily be reversed if you don’t like the result.
Note that due to the way WordPress displays preformatted text, you may not see the entire lines, but you can copy and paste them. Since you should never put any text into a terminal that you can’t fully see, and my advice doesn’t change just because I’m a resource, I suggest you put it into Notes first and then into the terminal from there once you see it yourself.
To halve the gap:
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 8 defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 8
You will need to log out and log in again to activate. You can try different numbers to change the spaces.
To return to default settings:
defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 8 defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 8
Is it useful for you? Please let us know in the comments.
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