Mac Menu Bar Spacing: Two Hidden Keys to Fit More Icons

#Where the bar runs out

Almost everyone who goes looking for this setting is on a notched MacBook. The camera housing splits the bar in two and takes 185 points of width on a 14-inch MacBook Pro and 220 on the 16-inch, and status items stack leftward from the clock until they reach it. What does not fit is not shuffled into an overflow menu: it is simply not drawn, with no chevron and no warning, which is why an app can look like it failed to launch when it is only parked behind the cutout. The same strip is what Dynamic Island apps for the Mac use, and the island spec page has the geometry in detail.

Spacing is the one lever that changes the arithmetic rather than the symptoms. AppKit reserves 16 points around each status item by default, so going to 8 frees about 8 points per third-party icon. Ten icons buy back roughly 80 points, and an icon plus its gap runs about 30, so the realistic win is two or three more visible items. That is a real gain on a 14-inch display and close to irrelevant on a 27-inch one.

#What System Settings offers, and what it does not

macOS 26 collected the menu bar controls into their own settings pane (they lived under Control Center in earlier versions). There are four useful things in it: which Control Center modules appear in the bar, an Allow in the Menu Bar list of every third-party app that wants a slot, when the bar auto-hides (Always, On Desktop Only, In Full Screen Only, Never), and whether macOS draws a background behind the bar instead of letting it float over the wallpaper.

None of them is a spacing control, and there has never been one. Apple's own documentation for the pane covers the toggles and stops there. The pane is still the first place to look, because turning off two modules you never click beats shaving points off every icon; which icons are which and the rest of the bar's settings are worth a pass before reaching for Terminal.

#The two keys

Both are undocumented global preferences read by AppKit, and both have worked since Big Sur, including on macOS 26.

Set spacing alone and the icons move closer while the highlights stay wide, which looks wrong when a menu opens. Most people write both to the same number.

The command, run as the logged-in user, no sudo:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 8
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 8

Below roughly 6 the icons start to touch and clicking the right one gets fiddly, which is the practical floor rather than a hard limit. To undo the change, delete the keys rather than writing 16 back, so the system default applies again:

defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing
defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding

-currentHost matters. It writes to the per-machine preference file for this user account, ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/.GlobalPreferences.<uuid>.plist, which is where AppKit reads these two keys from. Drop the flag and nothing happens. For a fleet, the same keys can be delivered as a configuration profile payload for .GlobalPreferences instead of a shell command.

#Why nothing changes until you log out

A status item reads the spacing value when it is created, not continuously, so existing icons keep the old gap and the bar looks untouched. Quitting and reopening one app moves that one icon. The reliable step is to log out and log back in, or restart, which recreates every status item at once.

Two things not to be surprised by. Reports disagree about whether Apple's own Control Center modules follow the keys at all, so the cluster nearest the clock may keep its original spacing while third-party icons tighten up. And the value is global, not per display: an external monitor with acres of free bar gets the same cramped spacing as the built-in screen.

#When spacing is the wrong fix

Tighter spacing helps if the bar is nearly full. If it is badly overfull, no value above zero saves it, and the better move is to stop showing some icons at all.

• Reorder before you shrink. Hold Command and drag a status item to move it. Overflow is decided by position, so dragging the ones you actually click to the right of the pile decides which items get hidden instead of leaving it to chance.
• Hide the rest. Ice is free and open source (GPL-3.0, by Jordan Baird) and keeps a hidden section plus its own bar for notched Macs; it also has a menu bar item spacing feature that writes these same keys, still marked beta and known to fail now and then. Hidden Bar does the simpler divider-and-collapse job. The guide to hiding menu bar icons walks through both.
• Spaced, free on the Mac App Store from Sindre Sorhus, does the opposite job: it adds separator items to group icons, which suits a wide external display rather than a crowded laptop bar.

One point in favor of the spacing keys over any app: they are reversible, cost nothing, and need no background process and no permissions, which is more than can be said for most ways of fixing a full menu bar.

#Frequently asked questions

#What this means for the notch

Trimming spacing is budgeting. The notch takes 185 or 220 points off the top of the screen whatever you do, and the fix is to make every remaining icon smaller than Apple intended, down to a floor set by how accurately you can click. Worth doing, and it ends where the arithmetic ends. The part nobody reclaims this way is the strip beside the camera itself, which the menu bar cannot use at all: on a notched MacBook that is screen you own, and currently it holds nothing.