GoKawiilI 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.
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 …
Steve Jobs famously said that what was needed was to start from the user experience, then work backwards to the technology. 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.
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’t 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’m firmly convinced nobody at Apple Park uses Spaces, otherwise, I simply cannot understand why it wouldn’t have been fixed.
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.
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’t like the result.
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’t ever paste any text into terminal that you can’t fully see, and my advice doesn’t 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.
To halve the spacing:
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 8 defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 8
You’ll need to log out and log in again to activate it. You can try other numbers to vary the spacing.
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