While staring at my Menu Bar today I thought to myself, there’s got to be a way to move those icons around. I tried the ol’ faithful drag with no luck. Then, as only a true keystroke freak would attempt, I began testing out modifier keys. I began with the normal keys. ctrl… alt… aha! The Apple key did the trick :)
If you feel the need to rearrange your menu bar icons, then simply hold down the command key, click on one of the icons, and drag it to a new position. Neat huh? If you have other menu bar icons from applications like Quicksilver, You Control: Tunes, or Visor you’ll immediately notice that this trick doesn’t always work.
There are two types of Menu Bar icons, the built-in OS X menu bar icons and 3rd party application icons. You may use this trick to rearrange the OS X icons among each other. However, you cannot move the OS X icons into the 3rd party application icon territory. I should also note that you cannot move the Spotlight icon either.
At some point in time you may want to clean up your menu bar a bit and remove any unused icons. The command + drag trick also works for removing icons. Just hold the command key down and drag the icon off the menu bar. You’ll see a small puff of smoke appear as the icon is removed, similar to what happens when you remove an icon from the dock. Be sure that you only remove icons that you really want off your menu bar, because there is no way to easily undo this. If you make a mistake or change your mind you’ll have to go poking around the System Preferences to find the option to turn the icon back on again.
I don’t know how I didn’t run across all this sooner. I’m sure there are long time Mac users that still don’t know this simple trick! I guess that’s why I’m here :)
Share This Article With Your Friends!
These are all good and useful observations and they deserve to be better known to all users. One item is not totally correct the statement that 3rd party menu items cannot be moved like apple’s with the command drag approach. Some 3rd party shareware can that is designed to do that. For instance we make iClock and it is draggable with command key down. This is very useful because iClock as a much more complete clock/calendar/alarms/stocks menu is much more useful when dragged all the way to the right next to spotlight. You can download and try it out from here:
http://www.scriptsoftware.com/iclock
Thanks for a great help article.
Julian
Wow iClock looks pretty neat. I’m going to have to give it a shot.
Thanks for correcting me. Do you know if there is a term for the menu bar icons that are movable vs the ones that aren’t? As you pointed out, referring to one kind as 3rd party icons and the other as OS X icons is flawed. It would be cool if someone developed a program that would allow you to move any menu bar icon!
An alternative to poking around through several different System Preference Panes: [your hard drive]>System>Library>CoreServices>MenuExtras
Welcome to Mac. Did you know the top corners of the menu bar for Spotlight and the Apple Menu are infinite targets? Don’t waste your time clicking precisely on the icons, just whip your mouse’s pointer into the respective corner and click.
Ohhhhh, nice tip droughtquake. I like that there is one place to turn on any of the built in OS X icons!
I always wondered why it was so easy to accidentally click on the spotlight icon, thanks for the heads up Titanium Man :)