Tong Family

Man, there are just too many things on the Menu bar. I bought and paid for Bartender 5 and I have to say it’s nice that it is so customizable, but it’s a little too customizable, so I’m putting that one away and going back to Dozer. This is the simplest possible application and it works great if you don’t have a notch on your MacBook. I highly recommend it for the simple stuff. You just Cmd-drag the icons around. There is a single button for frequently used and if you Ctrl-click on the button you get the rest.

But it is not notch-aware, so the icons get hidden.

Bartender Optimization

The Bartender utility is way, way, way more complicated, but it knows enough so that with the notch, it will just display these optional icons below the notch when you click on the three dots. That is really nice. The main issue is that you have unlimited customizability so you can really get into trouble, but it’s worth it.

For instance, they just introduced hierarchical groups so now you can get two layers of icons. I have to say there are so many useless icons these days that I don’t really know what to do with all of them, so I just have icons that just fit in the notch area and then the rest are shown below. Seems to work OK.

The thing that works best for me is to get rid of the dots menu and just use the hover over the empty menubar by right-clicking on the Bartender to get the options:

1. To show hidden entries, I enable in General, “Click on empty menu bar space”, “Swipe or scroll in menu bar)

Menubar Cleanup

Of course, the best thing to do is to get rid of as many icons as possible. This isn’t super easy and it is sprayed all over, but you should go to the Control Center area. Confusingly, there is no area just to set the Menu Bar stuff, it is tied mainly to the Control Center.

1. Go to the System Settings > Control Center. This is the first place for cleanup. For instance, I don’t show Bluetooth, AirDrop, or Focus on the Menubar since the Control center has all of those. Then there are optional modules like Accessibility and I do the same thing, making sure that “Show in the Control Center” is the old one activated. Finally, at the very bottom, there are menubar-only applications. I normally turn off Spotlight since I’ve memorized the shortcut. Also Time Machine and VPN (since I use NordVPN and it has its own menubar item).
2. The Keyboard for multiple languages has its menubar entry that is not part of the Control Center which is kind of annoying. It is in System Settings > Keyboard > Text Input > Edit and there at the top is an entry, “Show input menu in Menubar”. I leave it on since I use Greek for math and Chinese and it’s nice to have.