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Mac Tip: Move Menu Bar Contents Around In Mac OS X

Mac Tip: Move Menu Bar Contents Around In Mac OS X

This Mac tip is provided by Mark Greentree and was originally posted on Mark’s blog – Everyday Mac Support. For more of Mark’s tips visit his site, follow him on Twitter, or browse his archive of posts here.


How to: Move Menu Bar Contents Around In Mac OS X

Did you know that you can change the location of some of the Menu Bar icons?

The Menu Bar, as shown above, is located at the very top of your Mac’s display. It can hold a large volume of useful tools that can take advantage of this screen real estate.

Depending on how you like to visually see your information, you may wish to move the Menu Bar items to look similar to this:

In order to do this press and hold Command + Shift, then move your mouse pointer to the Menu Bar and click and drag the specific icon to a new location.

You can also remove icons from the Menu Bar by simply dragging it away from the Menu Bar to anywhere else on your screen. Upon doing so you will see a puff of smoke and the item in question will be removed. This is very similar to how the dock works.

If you have accidentally removed an item from your Menu Bar that you need, you will have to go back to the System Preferences or the application in question to return that item to the Menu Bar.

There are also some areas of the Menu Bar that can not be altered or removed. The Apple Menu and all contextual menus towards the left hand side of your display and the Spotlight search icon are excluded from this functionality.