Vanilla not working on Mac: what to check

The complaint arrives as one sentence, and the sentence covers at least five unrelated situations. The configuration dots cannot be found. The setup screen asking for permissions will not advance. Everything works but a strange gap sits next to the arrow. Nothing launches at login. Icons that were tucked away come back by themselves. Each has a different cause and a different fix, and the fastest route through is to identify which one is happening before touching any settings. Facts and version numbers below were checked on 10 September 2026.

Rule out a full menu bar first

The single most common misreading in this category is treating macOS behaviour as an application fault. When more status items exist than fit in the available width, macOS does not wrap them onto a second row and does not warn anyone. It simply stops drawing the overflow. The app producing that icon is running normally and is invisible.

This matters because a good share of "the icon disappeared" reports are not fixable by changing or reinstalling anything. The width is the constraint.

Checking takes one minute. Quit the menu bar tool completely, then count the status items from left to right. If items are missing while the tool is not even running, the cause sits outside it. If the count is right but behaviour is wrong, the cause is the app or its permissions. That one test halves the search space.

Two things make the width smaller than the screen suggests. On a MacBook with a notch, the camera housing occupies the centre, and status items never appear to the left of it. Separately, the frontmost application's own menus consume the left side, so bringing a design or development tool forward can push status items off the right edge that were visible a moment earlier.

Confirm it is running before debugging behaviour

A menu bar utility has no Dock icon and no window sitting open, so there is no ordinary signal that it is alive. That makes it easy to spend twenty minutes adjusting settings for a process that quit at some point and never came back.

Open Activity Monitor and search for the app by name. A single matching process means it is running and the problem is behavioural. No match means the problem is that it is not running, which is a different investigation with a much shorter list of causes: it was quit and not relaunched, it never launched at login, or it stopped when a permission was revoked.

This check also settles a common confusion about whether the icon is missing or the app is missing. Those two look identical from the menu bar and have nothing in common underneath. An app that is running but not drawing anything is a width problem. An app that is not running at all is a launch problem, and no amount of rearranging the bar will change it.

Do this check before the permission work below, because a process that is not running cannot demonstrate whether its permissions are correct.

The configuration dots are missing

Configuration happens by dragging small dots along the menu bar, so when the dots themselves are not drawn, there is no way into the settings. The developer treats this as common enough to warrant a dedicated page.

The notch at the top of the display in these new machines reduces the amount of space available to menu bar items. If you have more menu bar items than will fit in the right-hand side of the notch, macOS hides any icons that overflow this area.

Source: matthewpalmer.net

The documented sequence works by clearing space first and configuring second. Quit the app. Temporarily quit other menu bar apps, or remove some items, until everything fits to the right of the notch. Open the app and bring up its preferences window. One dot should be visible, or two if the option for completely removing icons is enabled. Command-drag the dots to the right end of the available space. Restart the other apps and re-add the items that were removed, which will now appear to the left of the dots. Then drag the dots to set the sections.

The ordering is the whole trick. Placing the dots at the right end before the other items come back is what keeps them from being pushed off the edge again.

The permission screen will not advance

Since macOS Catalina, the app has required Screen Recording permission in addition to Accessibility. The reason is documented: it captures the menu bar in order to blend its divider into the existing background, the capture covers only the top 50 pixels of the screen, and nothing is stored or transmitted.

Getting stuck at that screen usually means the two permission records are in an inconsistent state. The documented repair is to remove both entries completely and add them back by hand, in that order.

Quit the app, from its dot or through Activity Monitor. Open Privacy and Security, select Accessibility, highlight the entry and remove it with the minus button. Add it again with the plus button, navigating to the app in the Applications folder. Repeat the same removal and re-addition under Screen Recording. Then launch the app again.

Note that the developer's page uses the older System Preferences naming. Current macOS calls it System Settings, and the same lists live under Privacy and Security. Searching the settings window for the permission name goes straight there.

Removing before adding is not optional. Granting a permission while a stale record for the same app still exists produces the situation where the checkbox looks enabled and the feature stays dead.

A gap appears next to the arrow

Sometimes everything functions and the layout is simply wrong, with unexplained space around the divider. There is a documented cause for this one.

From macOS 12.4 onward, a clock setting shows and hides the date depending on available menu bar space. Every time that toggles, the total width of the system items changes, which puts the divider out of step with where it was placed.

The fix is to stop the date from toggling: set it to always show or never show rather than showing when space allows. The developer's page describes reaching it through Dock and Menu Bar, which is where it lived on macOS 12. On current versions the same control sits in the Control Center section of System Settings, under the clock options. After changing it, the divider may sit briefly in the wrong place, and clicking its arrows or quitting and relaunching repositions it.

Disconnecting or connecting an external display produces the same class of symptom for the same reason. The available width changes, so the arrangement needs to settle again. Anyone who docks and undocks a laptop several times a day should treat this as a property of the setup rather than a fault, and should judge candidate tools partly on how quickly the layout recovers from it.

It does not launch at login

Automatic launch is one of the paid features, and when it fails there are exactly two places to look.

The first is Login Items, under General in System Settings. Switching the entry off, then on again, is worth doing before anything more involved, since that registration is one of the things a major macOS upgrade can leave in a stale state. More than one entry may be listed for the same app, and all of them belong in the same state.

The second is less obvious. The application bundle declares that System Events is used to start the app at login, which means the automation permission for controlling System Events has to be granted. Anyone who declined that prompt at some point ends up with a setting that reads as enabled while nothing launches. Open Privacy and Security, then Automation, find the app in the list, and confirm that System Events is checked underneath it.

Hidden icons keep coming back

When an icon that was tucked behind the divider reappears on the visible side, the app that owns the icon is usually the one to look at rather than the tool managing the bar.

Some resident apps re-register their status item after every update. macOS places a newly registered item in the default position, which lands on the visible side of the divider. Pushing it back takes a second, but if it happens after every update, turning the icon off in that app's own preferences is the durable fix. Most apps that place a menu bar item offer a setting to stop doing so.

The other possibility runs in the opposite direction. The paid tier includes an option that hides icons again automatically five seconds after a toggle. Icons vanishing without an obvious trigger points at that setting being on. Icons refusing to hide after a toggle points at the same setting being off.

Version and system version

If none of the above matches, check what is actually installed against what the app requires.

What to check	Value on the current build
Version	2.2, internal build 61
Signature date	16 September 2025, notarised Developer ID
Minimum macOS	12.4
Update path	Check for Updates inside the app, or the download page

Anything older than macOS 12.4 will not run this build at all. The installed version number is visible from the app's own menu, and updates can be fetched from there, though re-downloading from the site is quicker when the in-app check misbehaves. A behaviour change immediately after a major macOS upgrade is the case where this check belongs first rather than last, because tools in this category have to follow each autumn release.

Reinstalling in the right order

When everything above has been tried, reinstall, but not by dropping a fresh copy over the old one.

Quit the app. Remove it from the Applications folder. Open Privacy and Security and delete its rows from Accessibility and Screen Recording. Only then download a current copy, install it, and grant the permissions fresh. Sign out and back in afterwards to confirm the arrangement survives a login cycle.

The order exists for the same reason as in the permissions section. Putting an identically named app back in the same place while old records remain makes it impossible to tell which record is in force, and that ambiguity is what turns a ten minute repair into an afternoon.

What to change first

Run the one minute test at the top before anything else, because it tells you whether the problem is even in the app. Then work down in this order: permissions, version, layout. If the answer turns out to be that the bar is simply full, the fix is allocation rather than repair, and Features and How it compares set out what the options actually differ on.