I just revamped my Mac’s menu bar, and I thought it would be fun to share this latest iteration with y’all. I make extensive use of the excellent Bartender app (Setapp), which supports a secondary menu bar and segmentation of both the primary and secondary menu bars (I use a “⏐” character as the separator and a pixel spacing of eight pixels).
There are six segments:
❶ Calendar and Next Appointment
❷ Primary Apps
❸ Primary System Controls, Time and Weather
❹ Fun Stats from iStat Menus
❺ Secondary Apps
❻ Secondary System Controls
Some menu bar apps of note:
- In Your Face (Setapp) – Shows the next appointment in the menu bar and, true to its name, fills the screen with an alert when it’s almost time for the appointment. It’s very well designed and highly customizable. For example, you can exclude appointments based on rules you define and whether or not the appointment has an alarm.
- Clean Shot X (Setapp) – My screenshot app of choice. It’s beautifully designed and has a rich feature set. For example, you can balance out screenshots if they were taken off-centre and accurately capture virtually any text on your screen.
- Grammarly Desktop – I often summon Grammarly when I want to do a quick spelling and grammar check in whatever app I’m using (e.g. Mail, Pages, Keynote). I have a Keyboard Maestro macro that toggles Grammarly on and off; I can easily summon Grammarly when it’s needed and dismiss it when it’s not.
- iStat Menus (Setapp) – I use iStat Menus to monitor my CPU and GPU usage (which is especially interesting on my new MacBook Pro with M3 Max). I also use it to display a clock in the menu bar. Clicking on the time reveals a list of cities, and I can dig deeper into details like the sunrise, sunset and golden hours.
- Mercury Weather – Developed by some fellow Vancouverites, Mercury Weather is an attractive and convenient weather app. On the Mac, there’s an option to display the current temperature and conditions in the menubar.
- Moom – My window manager of choice. I’ve looked at other window managers and keep coming back to Moom.
- QuitAll (Setapp) – I use this app to automatically quit apps if they haven’t been used in over an hour. It’s quite configurable (e.g. I can specify apps that I never want to be quit automatically) and, despite a few glitches, works well.
- Typinator – My text expansion app of choice. It’s quick and memory efficient and has a slick, modern Mac interface.
I’m also experimenting with Bartender’s new Presets feature. I have a “demo” preset that hides most of my menu items and am planning to create a “travel” preset that’s designed for my MacBook Pro’s screen and displays things I want front and centre while on the road (e.g. battery and Wi-Fi).
I hope you found this helpful!