```
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 2
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 2
```
My goal is genially not to have anything running in the menubar that isn't out of the box from the OS. I had a similar desire with the system tray on Windows (though it was more difficult on Windows due to some hardware requiring it).
Work is the only place I have an issue, because they install a bunch of security agents that all want a spot in the menubar, even though they never need me to interact with them or know what they're doing. Those agents sitting up in the menubar tend to be the reason my system has slow downs or issues. Though the slowdowns have gone away since moving to M1. On Intel my fan used to run all the time. Now I'm just left with the weird issues they cause.
I'm talking about the file manager missing features.
Wifi issues going back years and years.
Default mice settings that make me want to throw the thing out a window. Seriously, who moves their cursor that slow?
The worst window manager I've ever used.
I could go on, but it's genuinely pointless. People love their macs like people love their sports teams. No matter what, some people will always love the maple leafs.
> My goal is genially not to have anything running in the menubar that isn't out of the box from the OS.
My goal is to use the apps I want to use, and if they are exclusively menu bar apps, what can I do about that?
> The people with the most stuff up there tend to be the same ones who are always complaining about system slowness
The cause for system slowness on my mac are too many browser tabs eating 500 MB memory each, not a few 10 MB native Swift apps.
I should save this thread for every time someone tries to tell me that Windows is a horrible operating system that is a major reason to not buy a computer when I say things like "The MacBook Neo isn't that good of a deal and you can totally find a Windows laptop in the price range that's built well enough, has similar performance/battery life (or better)/trackpad, and leaves you with more RAM, storage, and I/O."
I've literally picked out laptops that are clearly better buys than the Neo/Air and people will tell me things like "well then you're stuck with Windows" or "but you'll have firmware problems" and then we have to remember that Apple has had plenty of that in their past.
How about those Nvidia GPUs that would fail inevitably in older MacBook Pros?
Or the butterfly keyboard?
Or how they can’t even make window corners that match with the Liquid Glass update?
I don’t love Windows, but I don’t hate it either. Amazing backward compatibility, and that is not to be ignored.
This very article is about how Tailscale frequently gets reports of them being hidden.
And I personally have had the icons hidden. My work laptop has a lot of stuff running on it (much of it is mandatory: VPN, custom company processes, Google Drive, etc) and combined with my personal preferred programs (f.lux, etc) it occasionally hits the limit and goes under the notch.
Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing around with drivers. Not out of any blinkered misconceptions about quality, usability, or an otiose love for Apple or their products otherwise.
All Windows laptops come preinstalled, there's no arsing about with drivers there either.
Unless you install the bare OS from scratch. Apple bundles the drivers for their hardware with their OS.
Good luck with plugging in anything non-Apple branded or not using standard USB audio or Ethernet CDC and you're 100% having to muck about with sketchy kexts that almost certainly will break in the next OS release.
You can do this for Windows too, that's how most corporate images are built.
One image and 30 different laptop models, that's how it's done in every competently run megacorp IT department. Do you think some poor technician is manually loading drivers onto every Windows laptop?
If you’re lucky. One laptop I had in the past (and ultimately returned) had an issue where the vendor-provided NVIDIA drivers were the only ones that allowed its GPU to perform correctly, but were very outdated, which resulted in Windows Update continuously updating them and dragging performance back down. I even tried using the policy editor to lock the drivers in but that failed too because the drivers are split into several pieces and I’d inevitably miss some component, resulting in broken half-updated drivers.
Apple has replaced kexts (kernel extensions) with a user-space alternative for many years now
No amount of FAQ will help these people. And this also results in hasty refund requests and even worse, chargebacks that take 2x the amount the users paid out of my pocket.
I recently helped my brother launch a simple app for making any window a PiP window (https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri) and in the first two days, half of the sales turned into refunds exactly because of this issue. People had so many menubar icons that they thought the app just doesn't work. Not an encouraging launch for his first app.
Not to mention the fact that the best solution that helped alleviate this, the Bartender app, was completely broken by Apple's internal API changes in macOS Tahoe.
This could have been handled better.
Windows solved this many many decades ago with their system tray overflow menu. Browsers solved it too, by letting you put extension icons in an overflow menu. It's not hard.
But nooo, macOS just silently hides applications from you, with no visible indication that there's anything hidden.
Can anyone speculate on any rational if not good reasons for not solving this problem yet?
While they do a ton of good work, they do love to claim everything was first invented by them.
"You shouldn't have so many utilities running"
It's the go-to Apple user response to anything the OS doesn't support or does poorly: "Why would you want to do that?"
Why Apple still hasn't fixed this in 2026 baffles me. The fact that a company the size of Tailscale has to find workarounds for an Apple blunder like this speaks volumes about how terrible Apple's software management is.
i don't get it.
Took me months to figure out it was running afterall and just hidden by the notch.
How hard is for apple to move the "least used icons" to a fold? (but still accessible)
I always love these types of arguments. Program does one thing bad so stop getting value of out it. lol.
Between the larger display scaling, losing space to the notch, and the IT department setting up new computers with 8 little pieces of preinstalled bullshit up there, Apple's perspective on this seems to be "if the Ivanti VPN menu extra disappears I guess you didn't really need that anyway!"
Having the sound, bluetooth, wifi, and other system stuff removed from the bar and accessible in control center helps, but is not sufficient.
They're too busy solving important problems like "how can I use part of my screen as a videoconferencing light source" and chasing yearly iOS new feature parity to deal with pesky things like menu extras. It's only been 25 years since OS X came out.
My visual acuity at distance has not changed from when I was 20. My ability to read tiny, poorly-contrasted text at phone distance has.
Enlarging text size is a massive benefit to everyone as we age. It’s one of the reasons that older readers were among the first to adopt e-ink readers and tablets: every book suddenly becomes a large-print book. In the world of accessibility this is one of the easiest things to do with one of the largest impacts. Not everyone is blind, not everyone is hard of hearing, but everyone gets presbyopia if they live long enough.
I theoretically "lose" that much height but gain a) zero notch b) non-rounded top corners and c) a traditionally heighted menubar instead of the giant one that is so big only to cater for the notch.
+ I thought this was thanks to BetterDisplay but it turns out no third party tool is needed and it's all first party probably because someone at Apple is as annoyed by the notch as I was and so that's their solution.
My personal winner is breaking Mail on the iPad mini: the message list and message window now always display at a bizarre fixed width. On the Mini's smaller screen every single subject line is truncated in portrait mode. Did Apple fire all their testers? Are they letting the developers test their own crap?
My only hope at this point is it gets _so_ bad it becomes an absolute meme and they get around to fixing it.
Really depressing design dereliction and/or incompetence.
Hacky menu bar modification tools are basically an accessibility requirement for me, and my vision isn't even that bad. (Best corrected is 20/30 or 20/40 or so.) People with serious impairments are totally screwed by this on macOS, sometimes even with large external monitors.
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/8y0QbZN
The gap between "Run" and "Tests" is the notch, which I don't usually notice is there unless I'm in Rider.
Investing in a visual redesign (Liquid Glass) but not an obvious UX issue of the notch hiding icons seems like a mis-prioritization.
This along with the tons of other paper cuts they've slacked on is tarring their brand.
And yes, it's completely bizarre that macOS doesn't provide an overflow menu. Instead, again yes for decades, you've had to buy/use something like Bartender for this. It is utterly bizarre and inexplicable.
With Tahoe, Apple has finally provided a half-solution, which is that in System Settings you can entirely hide select running menubar utilities to regain some space. But of course that's only helpful for utilities you never need to look at or click.
tl;dr: yes this is utterly absurd but it's been absurd for decades. It's nothing to do with recent versions of macOS.
Apple software sucks so bad!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40584606
I think they've cleaned it up since then [1], but in the age of supply chain attacks, very concerning. Personally, even as a paying user of Bartender, I moved to the open source solution, at least I can watch the github for changes.
[1] https://www.macbartender.com/b5blog/Lets-Try-This-Again/
https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice/releases/tag/0.11.13-dev....
Note that this particular problem has existed for well over a decade. It's atrocious, but let's not pretend it's anything new.
The notch has just made menu bar space more scarce than it used to be.
If I open Xcode today on a 14" MacBook, two menu items extend past the notch, and they still hide your menu bar icons.
This has been the case for a long long time, and it's always been an obvious failure case.
access to my home server
ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network)
ability to make it easy for others with non-tech backgrounds to connect with their devices (parents, kids, etc)
ability to have remote linux servers connect automatically on boot. This one is because I can't get OTA TV at home and want to set up a simple streaming box at someone else's house to do it that connects back to my house, so we can stream off all of our devices.
I'm guessing tailscale will be a part of this setup which is why I ask here.
Set up a US device as an exit node, and configure other devices to proxy through it.
Should note that Tailscale does not work natively with hdhr for mpeg television streams b/c wireguard doesn't natively support udp multicast/broadcast. Also can't directly port forward b/c hdhr sets a default ttl of 2.
My understanding is that most VPNs in general don't support udp multicast due to operating on the network layer rather than data link, though iirc OpenVPN supports multicast traffic through its virtual TAP (Layer 2) rather than TUN (Layer 3).
Tailscale does create a TUN/TAP virtual network[0], though udp multicast is still not natively supported.
[0]: https://tailscale.com/docs/concepts/tailscale-osi#data-link-...
By default it will leak your so-called “private” network behavior to Tailscale (connections on what port, from what node, to what node, opened when, closed when): https://tailscale.com/docs/features/logging
The interface is bad when it comes to provisioning but it can be done with a QR code and once it works the native experience of turning on the VPN was just stunningly fast. In this day and age you expect things to be slow with negotiation and various unreliable steps but it was just amazing that I tap the VPN button on iOS and it's connected in a fraction of a second.
Im "shocked" how perfect it functions! It worked out of the box for a fairly simple but old windows setup where I could apply it: Everything was perfectly fine, super user friendly in the beginning.
Actually one of the tools that you could use to admin your mum & dad computer
But am I misremembering this?
Let people — not your app — decide whether to put your menu bar extra in the menu bar. Typically, people add a menu bar extra to the menu bar by changing a setting in an app’s settings window. To ensure discoverability, however, consider giving people the option of doing so during setup.
Avoid relying on the presence of menu bar extras. The system hides and shows menu bar extras regularly, and you can’t be sure which other menu bar extras people have chosen to display or predict the location of your menu bar extra.
Consider exposing app-specific functionality in other ways, too. For example, you can provide a Dock menu that appears when people Control-click your app’s Dock icon. People can hide or choose not to use your menu bar extra, but a Dock menu is aways available when your app is running.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Apple’s opinion seems to be: running out of space happens to only a few people running tons of menu-bar-loving apps, so if you are dorky enough to run into this problem, you should be dorky enough to solve it yourself.
I know this means I'm wasting potential pixels, and wasting all the engineer effort that went into the nearly bezel-free design, but worth it IMHO.
As a Linux user and fan of good GUI apps, it always bums me out I'm stuck with the CLI-only options for apps like Tailscale. Even for a simple tray icon I have to resort to buggy GNOME extensions.
I understand the fragmented ecosystem and small user-base on the desktop Linux side make it hard to justify, but I hope that changes one day!
This, at least, is not correct. Hold down Command and drag an icon to rearrange the order.
but not being able to interact with an icon is DISfunctionality, though yes, a simple one. So that principle can't explain the bad design either.
Guess I'll just stick with CLI only for now (via darwin-nix)
My recommendation is to rethink it to work like apps like 1Password, Default Folder, Keyboard Maestro, Ice, etc., where I can always easily open a configuration app, but the service must be intentionally/knowingly quit via either the configuration app or the menu bar utility.
TLDR: Please separate the service from the new configuration app.
Mullvad, your turn next please
It is an app that sits in the background and provides connectivity. Occasionally you need to change a setting. Absolutely nobody wants a rich windowed UI, or a menu bar widget that drops down a complex detail card.
I hope they can see this is exactly what killed desktop anti-virus: something that was supposed to be quietly doing its job in the background started getting in the users way. It needed to poke its head up and scream "hey remember me?" at the behest of some product managers or growth hackers. Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience.
> Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience.
So Apple are going to bake Tailscale into the OS? Also, read the blog. It's a response to Apple's bad user experience.
I use tailscale every single day.