Customize the Mac Toolbar in Finder and at the Top of the Screen

Three different strips on a Mac get called the toolbar, and they are customized in three unrelated places. The row of buttons at the top of a Finder window is one. The equivalent row in Mail, Preview or Pages is another. The black strip across the very top of the screen, with the Apple logo on the left and the clock on the right, is a third, and it is the one people usually mean when the complaint is that there is too much in it.

Knowing which one is in play saves a lot of clicking, because a setting that works on one has no effect on the others. What follows covers all three, in the order they are most often meant, along with the point where the built-in settings stop being enough.

Three strips, three places to change them

Strip	Where to change it	What it remembers
Toolbar in an app window	View menu, Customize Toolbar, inside that app	Per app, and usually per window type
Finder toolbar	View menu, Customize Toolbar, in the Finder	One layout for all Finder windows
Menu bar at the top	System Settings, Menu Bar and Control Center	Per user account, across every app

The pattern to notice is that the first two live in the View menu of whatever app is in front, and the third lives in System Settings. If a search for a toolbar setting keeps landing in the wrong place, this is why.

The toolbar inside an app window

Most Mac apps put a toolbar at the top of their windows, and most of them allow the same four edits. Apple's own guide states the mechanics.

Add a button: Choose View > Customize Toolbar, then drag an item from the palette to the toolbar until a plus sign appears. Source: support.apple.com, read September 25, 2026

The other three are worth knowing because none of them are discoverable. Holding Command and dragging a button out of the toolbar removes it, with a poof effect to confirm. Holding Command and dragging a button along the toolbar rearranges it, dropping it when a gap opens. And View, Hide Toolbar takes the whole row away, with View, Show Toolbar bringing it back. Some apps add View, Always Show Toolbar in Full Screen, which is the setting to reach for when a toolbar keeps disappearing at the top of a full screen window.

Two smaller details save time later. In some toolbars, Customize Toolbar offers a Show pop-up menu that decides whether buttons carry text labels as well as icons, which is the difference between a row that is readable and a row that has to be memorized. And when a window is made narrow enough that buttons no longer fit, they are not lost. A More Items pop-up appears at the end of the toolbar and holds whatever did not fit.

That last behaviour is worth remembering, because the menu bar at the top of the screen does not do it, and the difference explains a lot of confusion later in this article.

The Finder toolbar, which has extra tricks

The Finder uses the same View, Customize Toolbar sheet, and adds three things the general case does not.

The first is that a file or an app can be dropped into the toolbar directly. Hold Command, drag the item onto the toolbar, and release when a green plus sign appears. A frequently used project folder or an app that files get dropped onto becomes a one-click target from every Finder window. Removing it again is the same gesture in reverse, Command-dragging it out.

The second is spacers. The Customize Toolbar palette includes both a flexible space and a fixed space, which is the only way to keep the search field pinned to the right while buttons stay grouped on the left.

The third is a side effect worth knowing before hiding the toolbar in a hurry. Apple's guide is explicit about it: hiding the Finder toolbar also hides the sidebar, and moves the status bar from the bottom of the window to the top. A reader who hides the toolbar to get more room and then cannot find the sidebar has met this, not a bug.

Finder windows also share one layout across all of them, unlike per-window-type toolbars in some apps. Change it once and every window follows, which makes it worth spending a minute on rather than tolerating the default row.

The menu bar at the top of the screen

This is the strip most people want to thin out, and the settings for it are in System Settings, Menu Bar. The General section holds the setting that surprises people most.

Automatically hide and show the menu bar has four options, not two. Always hides it everywhere. On Desktop Only hides it except in full screen apps. In Full Screen Only does the opposite. Never keeps it permanently visible. Moving the pointer to the top of the screen brings a hidden bar back. Next to it, Show menu bar background decides whether the strip carries its own background or lets the wallpaper show through, which changes legibility more than it changes looks.

Below that is the list of system items that can appear: Siri, Spotlight, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Battery, Focus, Screen Mirroring, Display, Sound, Now Playing, Fast User Switching, Time Machine, VPN and Weather. Several of them, including Focus, Screen Mirroring, Display, Sound and Now Playing, have a pop-up with two choices: Show When Active, which draws the icon only while the feature is doing something, and Always Show. Setting the ones that matter to Show When Active is the single highest yield change available here, because it removes icons without removing capability.

The clock is the exception. It is always shown, and Clock Options is where its format is set, including the day of the week, a 24-hour clock, seconds and AM/PM.

Further down, a section named Allow in the Menu Bar lists items provided by installed apps, and a Reset Control Center button at the bottom returns the whole arrangement to its original state. Items can also be dragged straight into the menu bar while customizing Control Center, which is the route Apple documents for putting a Control Center module up in the strip permanently.

Moving and removing status items by hand

Beyond System Settings there is one direct gesture. Hold Command and drag a status item along the menu bar to move it. Control Center items dragged off the strip entirely go back into Control Center.

Two limits apply. The clock stays at the right end and cannot be moved. And items belonging to third-party apps mostly cannot be dragged away, because their presence is decided by the app's own preferences rather than by macOS. For those, the route is the app's settings window, usually a checkbox named something like Show icon in menu bar.

This is where the built-in customization runs out, and it runs out in a specific way. macOS has no overflow list for the menu bar. When the app menus on the left and the status items on the right no longer fit, the items furthest from the clock stop being drawn, with no indicator and no way to reach them. The same situation in an app window produces the More Items pop-up described earlier. In the menu bar it produces silence. On a MacBook with a notch, the usable width ends at the notch rather than at the edge of the display, so the limit arrives sooner than the screen size suggests.

That gap is what a menu bar manager for macOS exists to fill: items stay installed and reachable, but they are held outside the visible strip until asked for, rather than competing for width. What those tools can and cannot do is set out on Features, and a side by side list of the ones available for macOS, including the free ones, is on How it compares.

Control Center, and why it is the other half of the menu bar

Menu Bar settings and Control Center are one pane with two lists, and treating them as separate is what makes the strip hard to reason about. Every module in Control Center has three possible states: in Control Center only, in Control Center and the menu bar, or gone. The pop-up next to each item is where that is decided.

The practical use of this is to demote rather than delete. Bluetooth is the clearest example. It is needed a few times a week, to pair headphones or a keyboard, and it occupies width every minute of every day. Taken out of the menu bar it is still one click away inside Control Center, which itself never moves. Screen Mirroring, Display brightness, Sound and Focus all fit the same description.

A short exercise makes the decision concrete. Look at the strip and, for each icon, answer whether it was clicked in the last week. Anything clicked daily earns its place. Anything clicked weekly belongs in Control Center. Anything not clicked at all is either a status display worth keeping visible, such as a battery figure or a recording indicator, or an item that can go entirely. Most strips shrink by a third on the first pass.

The Reset Control Center button at the bottom of the pane makes this safe to experiment with, since a bad arrangement can be undone in one click rather than rebuilt by memory.

Changes that survive, and changes that do not

Not every customization sticks, and the ones that do not tend to be blamed on the wrong thing.

Toolbar layouts inside apps are stored by the app itself, which means they survive updates but not a reinstall that clears preferences, and they do not travel to another Mac unless preferences are migrated. The Finder toolbar is stored per user account, so a second account on the same Mac starts from the default row.

Menu bar settings are also per user account. This is the usual explanation for a strip that looks different after logging into a second account for testing, or after a fresh install where migration brought documents but not settings.

The order of status items is the least durable of all. macOS keeps each item's position, but an app that is updated, quit and relaunched, or granted a new permission can reappear in a different place. Anyone who has carefully arranged a strip and found it rearranged a week later has met this. It is not a setting that was lost, it is that the order is owned by the items rather than by a single list, and there is no built-in way to lock it.

That distinction matters when choosing how to fix a crowded strip. Settings that hide an item are durable, because they are recorded once. Arrangements that depend on position are not, which is the argument for a tool that keeps a layout of its own and reapplies it, rather than arranging icons by hand every few weeks.

What to change first

Work out which strip is the problem before changing anything, because the three fixes do not overlap. If it is an app window, View, Customize Toolbar solves it in a minute. If it is the top of the screen, open System Settings, Menu Bar, and set Focus, Sound, Display and Now Playing to Show When Active before doing anything else. If icons are still going missing after that, the strip is simply out of room, and Koffret is the part of the answer System Settings does not have.