There is already the "Show Menu Bar in Context Menu" command, I'd love to have the same for the menu bar icons so that you can quickly access (e.g. right-click) one in case it's not visible because it didn't fit.
Background: recently switched to a 14" macbook with a notch and often run into the situation that I cannot access one or the other menu bar icon (I have a careful selection of menu bar icons which I usually want to have and usually work on an external monitor were everything fits, only sometimes on the go I'm missing a few here and there).
Because of Apple's stupid restriction to show menu bar icons only to the right of the notch (independent of if there would be plenty of space to the left), features like BTT's "Hide Menu Bar Items temporarily" don't help that much.
PS: I know about Bartender (and its Bartender Bar, which would similarly solve my issue) but feel like this would be a good fit for BTT.
I'm not sure if this helps and I didn't test, but with the Notch Bar your icons can be in a (horizontally) scrollable area. So you should be able to make all of them visible by scrolling ... I think
Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you
Is that some BTT feature you are referring to? Otherwise you have you have menubar items to the left (well the "menus" of the current active/foreground app), these are fixed; and you the icons to the right, these can be moved with cmd+drag but this area is not scrollable, hence currently hidden icons (e.g. behind/beyond the notch) cannot be retrieved while on a small screen.
Thank you very much for the suggestions, theoretically this could help me, however either I'm too dumb or there's something really buggy but I cannot get any of the status icon widgets to show up anywhere.
I tried to add the "Notch Bar Status Items Widget" as well as the "Mimic System Status Icons" (as well as "Mini version of the menubar status icons") but I can select whatever display options and they never appear in the notch bar, in neither of the two modes.
Do you see what I might be doing wrong here?
Both modes:
BTT needs screen recording permissions in system settings -> security & privacy for this to work.
However even then it will not be able to show hidden items
I would recommend Bartender for menu bar icon management;-)
The part with screen recording permissions was clear to me. I even now removed them and re-added them (as sometimes there are reports that this "helps"), still nothing.
Ok, if it cannot extract hidden ones it won't be useful to me, still wondering how it doesn't capture anything. My menu bar (without BTT) at least shows some that are not hidden:
Anyway, not too important then, not sure if my initial feature request (show all menu bar icons e.g. in a context menu, like there is already the option for the menu bar items) would be feasible.
If not let's close this feature request; if possible, let's keep it open
(PS: I knew about Bartender but a dedicated app purchase for just this purpose of macOS stupidity is too much for me, so I'll rather keep ranting on how stupid this macOS auto-hiding of icons is (esp. with the notch, as here they only display to the right ...), without any option to display all )
unfortunately showing them in a context menu is also not feasible for me. Bartender is using many complex tricks to make it work, but this is way out of scope for BTT ;-(
Thanks! I really hope Apple fixes this status item chaos with the next macOS. This has been annoying for such a long time and would be so simple to solve.
@Frank1 your pointers were super helpful, I now know about the BTT notch bar feature
Regarding apple changing this: let's see, there are some rumours on a "dynamic island" feature for the next macOS version but who knows a) if this comes at all and b) whether it'll change the current situation for the better or the worse
I would make the same suggestion as @Andreas_Hegenberg, and get Bartender4, or If you prefer free Dozer, Hidden, Vanilla.
But Bartender is the better one, as it has a nice feature called "Bartender Bar" that puts the sorted icon in a little pop up (sub bar under the menu bar) when clicking the divider.
I personally put all menubar icons in that Bartender Bar, except for the Volume, WiFi, Battery menu bar items.
It also has a hotkey to search for menu bar items, and when you select the one you want from search, it will jump to that menu bar item, and you can select from its options via keyboard Up/Down arrows & Enter.. This can be extended with Alfred as well and you can just use an Alfred Workflow to trigger one of the available options for that app in the menu bar.
Actually there are no free ones that tackle the problem I initially described. I had already briefly checked the 3 ones you mentioned before I opened this topic here.
They can hide menu bar icons, not "unhide" ones that macOS decided to hide because of: not enough space to the right of the notch.
I did a test with the small Macbook screen ... and I can scroll.
