{"id":252582,"date":"2026-05-22T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/22\/how-to-stop-menu-bar-items-being-hidden-behind-the-macbook-pro-notch\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T12:20:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T16:20:10","slug":"how-to-stop-menu-bar-items-being-hidden-behind-the-macbook-pro-notch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/22\/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":"

How to stop menu bar items being hidden behind the MacBook Pro notch<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/9to5mac.com\/2026\/05\/22\/how-to-stop-menu-bar-items-being-hidden-behind-the-macbook-pro-notch\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-05-22 12:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: 9to5mac.com<\/a><\/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

<\/p>\n

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.<\/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…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How to stop menu bar items being hidden behind the MacBook Pro notch https:\/\/9to5mac.com\/2026\/05\/22\/how-to-stop-menu-bar-items-being-hidden-behind-the-macbook-pro-notch\/ Publish…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":252583,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/9to5mac.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2026\/05\/How-to-stop-menu-bar-items-being-hidden-behind-the-MacBook-Pro-notch.jpg?resize=1200%2C628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[51],"class_list":["post-252582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-macintosh","tag-macbook-pro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252582"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252582"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":252584,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252582\/revisions\/252584"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/252583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}