On this laptop the menu bar is interrupted by the camera housing in the middle. Items fill in from the right, and once they reach that point any further items are simply not shown — no overflow, no way to scroll, nothing.
I run several utilities that live in the menu bar and I have lost access to some of them entirely.
Is there a setting for this, or is the only answer to use fewer menu bar items?
There are three approaches and they suit different tolerances.
Change the display resolution. Selecting a scaled resolution that is not the native one moves the menu bar below the housing entirely, giving you the full width back. In the display settings, showing the full list of resolutions reveals options that do this. You lose a little vertical space and, depending on the scaling, a little sharpness.
Use a menu bar manager. Several third-party utilities exist specifically for this. They collect items into a managed area, let you hide the ones you rarely need, and some provide a secondary bar below the menu bar where overflow items live. This is the most flexible answer and it is what most people with many utilities end up using.
Reduce the number of items. Unglamorous and genuinely effective. Many utilities have an option to hide their icon, and a surprising number of them you never actually click.
One practical tip that costs nothing: applications with wide menus make it worse, and you may not have noticed which.
Status items are hidden when the application menus on the left extend far enough to meet them. So the number you can display varies by which application is in front — a program with many long menu titles pushes the boundary right and hides more of your icons.
If items appear and disappear as you switch applications, that is the mechanism, and it is not a bug. Switching to a program with short menus temporarily reveals icons you thought were gone, which is a useful emergency way to reach one.
For utilities you genuinely need but rarely click, check whether they can be driven another way — a keyboard shortcut, a command line interface, or a shortcut automation.
Several of the popular menu bar tools have all three, and moving one or two off the bar entirely and onto a hotkey is often better than managing them. It also survives you buying a different machine with a different bar.
@mac_dev_mina · 2w ago
Worth understanding why the behaviour is what it is, because it explains why there is no built-in overflow.
The menu bar was designed as a single continuous strip with application menus on the left and status items on the right. The housing splits it into two regions, and the system fills status items from the right edge inward until it runs out of room at the split. There was no overflow mechanism before because there was never a hard wall in the middle.
So this is a case where new hardware met an old interface assumption. It has improved across releases — item spacing and handling of the split have been adjusted more than once — but the fundamental constraint remains, which is why the utilities exist.
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