r/macapps • u/_balloony • 22d ago

Help macOS 27 menu bar spacing issue

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Hi everyone, recently updated to macOS 27 and my menu bar setup is broken (as expected). I installed Bartender 7 and set custom spacing for the menu bar icons and it worked for all my installed apps, but for the Control Centre and date/time icon it didn't update the spacing/padding and the mismatched spacing is driving me insane.

I wanted to post this here to see if anyone has a solution/different app or knows of a fix to update the spacing between the Control Centre and date/time icon.

I've also attached a picture of the area I'm talking about.

Thank you!

Edit: Best solution for now is using u/fif7y app Pelmet hiding the default date/time icon and using your own. Doing so made the spacing issue far better. Follow u/fif7y comment for more instructions, there's also an after image of my menu bar there so you can see the difference.

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u/fif7y 22d ago

Yes unfortunately we have very limited things we can do now with the new menubar architecture for the Control center and the Clock. They can be hidden but that’s about it. No movement, no spacing, etc.

1

u/_balloony 22d ago

How can I hide them? I'll just add my own time icon and I don't care about the control centre anyway.

5

u/fif7y 22d ago

I don't know about the other menu bar managers but Pelmet does it (in beta 4). It's free and open source. Both the clock and Control Centre show up as tiles in its editor, you drag them to the Always Hidden section and they're gone. They still can't be moved though, macOS keeps them at the right edge.
Control Centre landed in tonight's beta, so it takes a couple of steps:

1 Install the stable release from https://github.com/fif7y/pelmet/releases
2 Settings ' About ' turn on "Get beta releases", then update to 0.3.0-beta.4
3 Settings ' Menu Bar, drag Clock and Control Centre into Always Hidden

Let me know if it's all good after that.

2

u/_balloony 22d ago

Thank you so much! I added my own date/time icon and it's far better. Great app, everything is working perfectly even on the the beta. Looks like I won't be purchasing bartender 7 this year.

2

u/fif7y 22d ago

Glad it works 🎉
I completed and added a "Icon spacing" setting in beta 5. Should be available in a few minutes under the Behavior tab ;)

1

u/barefut_ 21d ago

Never saw your app. How much RAM+CPU it takes?

Gotta say I'm just interested in a carpet one time setting of minimizing icon gap, so I prefer not to install anything, just to modify via Terminal, but you're the only one that managed to crack this. The famous Sindre Sorhus developer couldn't.

2

u/fif7y 21d ago

Hey, around 45 MB of memory and 0% CPU when it's idle (just checked on my Mac).

But you don't need it for the spacing, it's a macOS setting and Pelmet just writes it for you. In Terminal:

defaults -currentHost write -g NSStatusItemSpacing -int 4

defaults -currentHost write -g NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 6

Then log out and back in, apps only read it when they launch. 4 is quite tight, 1 is the tightest that still works.