Mac Tip

How to customize the Dock and menu bar of your Mac

Customize Dock and menu bar on your Mac

macOS lets you customize the Dock and menu bar effortlessly. Starting with macOS Big Sur and carried forward by its successor macOS Monterey, the System Preferences saw some revamp. You can figure out most of these changes on your own. But there are a few things you should know to get started.

So here, we’ll show you how to customize the Dock and menu bar on Mac.

Exploring your Mac’s Menu Bar: a beginner’s guide

MacBook desktop - learn the menu bar

If you’re a new Mac user, we want to help make your macOS experience as productive and efficient as it can be. From understanding the various icons, to customizing its layout, here are the basics of the menu bar that you need to know, along with some tips to help you use it more effectively.

How to add the weather forecast to your Mac menu bar

Seeing weather data from menu bar on Mac

The menu bar on your Mac is a handy spot to quickly see the date, time, or battery level, plus have fast access to your Notification Center, Spotlight Search, or Siri. So, why not have your weather conditions there too? Then at a glance, you can check the current temperature and click for your forecast.

Instead of opening a separate app to get these details, here’s how to add the weather forecast to your Mac menu bar.

How to quickly toggle dark mode using a keyboard shortcut on Mac

Dark mode is one of the more popular features of OS X Yosemite, because it allows you to add a dark tint to both the dock and the menu bar on Mac. The standard way to enable dark mode involves venturing to System Preferences, opening the General section, and clicking on the enable dark mode option. But wouldn't it be cool if you could toggle dark mode using a simple keyboard shortcut?

How to make third-party menu bar icons look better with dark mode on Mac

OS X Yosemite introduced a new dark mode option to change the tint color of both the menu bar and the dock in OS X. While I'm a big fan of dark mode, some of the third-party apps that I use have not been updated to play nice with dark mode. This results in menu bar icons that look weird with dark mode enabled, because they don't invert after toggling dark mode on.

If you're someone who always uses dark mode and never switches to regular mode, there is a way to force these menu bar icons to look better with dark mode enabled...

How to restart the menu bar on Mac

Restart frozen and non-responding menu bar on your Mac

On rare occasions, I encounter a frozen menu bar on my Mac. Perhaps you have also faced a scenario where the beach ball appears when hovering over the menu bar. A lot of time, this can be resolved by killing the single app that's causing problems. However, in other situations, you may need to completely kill and restart the menu bar to do the job.

The menu bar, more specifically the menu bar extras located on the right side of the screen, is controlled by the SystemUIServer process on macOS. Therefore, killing SystemUIServer will result in the menu bar restarting. Here's how.