On the right side of the menu bar on your Mac you've got a set of menus that are usually
represented, instead of by text, by little icons.
Thus they're called menu bar icons or sometimes menu bar buttons.
These special menus persist no matter which app you're using.
They're always there and they do special functions.
Like, for instance, the volume one here allows you to change the volume and also choose different
devices for output like speakers or headphones, etc.
So these do different things but how do you decide what goes there and how can you arrange.
So for the most part these are all connected either to an app, some sort of system extension,
or something in System Preferences.
You can make them appear or go away depending on which type of thing they are.
For instance, the volume control here is part of System Preferences and you can get to it
by going either to Sound Preferences right there in the menu or you could go to System
Preferences and to Sound.
Either way it will take you to the same place.
So here in System Preferences, Sound you'll see at the bottom Show Volume in Menu Bar.
If I deselect that you can see it goes away.
So in the case of volume control this is how you make this appear and disappear.
This is true for anything else related to something in System Preferences.
For instance in System Preferences if we look at Keyboard and we take a look at Input Sources
we can see there Show Input menu in menu bar.
Which is this right here.
So I can get rid of that there.
So for those it's connected depending upon which of System Preferences is accessed by
that menu item.
Now if this comes from a special app like say here's the one for Jumpcut which allows
you to save multiple clipboard items.
Then you can usually get rid of it by either quitting that app it's got running in the
background or you can go to Preferences and sometimes there's the ability to change what
appears there.
So in this case in Appearance you can change which icon appears.
Sometimes you can make it go away but sometimes the only way to make it go away is to actually
Quit the app.
So I'll Quit Jumpcut here and you can see it disappears because the entire purpose of
that app is to put that minibar icon up there.
So that makes sense.
A lot of these others work the same way because they've been added by different apps and their
extensions.
Now you can rearrange these by holding the Command key on your keyboard and dragging
them left or right.
You can put them in any order you want.
You can go and do that for anything except the last one which brings up the Notifications.
That always has to be on the right.
But everything else including Siri here, Spotlight, this is Fast User Switching, to switch between
users, this is the date.
All that stuff.
Everything can be rearranged as you like it to appear and which order you like.
Now usually it's just a matter of preference.
Sometimes it's important because if you're dealing with a crowded menu bar, like maybe
you're running say Microsoft word has a huge menu bar with lots of commands across here.
On a smaller screen basically you're going to sacrifice the left most icons here.
They'll go away in order to make room for those menu items.
So if there is something you need to access when you're running Microsoft word you may
actually move that more to the right than something that you rarely would access if
you're using word.
Also you can use this technique to get rid of some of them.
So, for instance, here's the Accessibility Preferences.
I can go to Accessibility Preferences in there and turn it off with a checkbox.
But I can also Command, Drag it down and out and you can see it changes to an X with the
cursor there and if I release it goes away with a little shwish sound.