Menu bar icons hidden behind the notch? How to get them back

They are not broken and not gone. On a MacBook with a notch, the right side of the menu bar ends at the camera, and any icon that does not fit there is hidden. On macOS 27 a small double arrow appears beside the notch when that happens: click it and the hidden icons show up on the left of the notch. To stop it happening, Command-drag the icons you need to the right, switch off the ones you never use, or tighten the spacing between them.

Last updated: October 2026

Written by the developer of Crest, a Mac notch app, on 6 October 2026. Every step was tried on a 16-inch MacBook Pro (Mac16,7) on macOS 27.0.1, with a small test app that puts numbered icons in the menu bar, so the pictures show test icons and not anyone's real setup. Ice and Bartender are described from their own pages, not tested here. Crest comes last, for the one thing macOS does not do.

Why the notch hides icons

The menu bar is split in two by the camera housing. App menus fill the left side and menu bar icons fill the right side, each stopping at the notch. Nothing is ever drawn under it. On the test Mac, in its More Space setting (2056 by 1329 points), the notch is 220 points wide and leaves 918 points on each side. Every icon-sized item took 38 points, so even an empty right side holds about 24 of them, and the clock, Wi-Fi and Control Center take their share first.

When the icons run out of room, macOS hides the ones nearest the notch, which are usually those of the apps that started last. Apple's guidelines say the system "may hide some to avoid crowding app menus". macOS 27 adds a way to see them, below. We tried everything on this page on macOS 27 only, so we cannot say whether macOS 26 has the same button.

The fix built into macOS 27: the arrows beside the notch

Too many icons. Six test icons fit beside the notch; the other eight are hidden behind the double arrow.

1. Look just right of the notch. If icons are hidden, macOS 27 shows a small double arrow pointing left.
2. Click it. The hidden icons appear on the left of the notch, where the app menus usually are, and the arrow turns to point right.
3. Click the arrows again to put things back.

One click later. The hidden icons, 7 to 14, appear on the left of the notch. Click the arrows again to put them back.

The arrow belongs to macOS itself, not to any app, and VoiceOver reads it as Show Hidden Menu Bar Items. It only appears when something is hidden, so if you never see it, nothing is.

Keep the icons you need where they always fit

The icons nearest the notch are the first to go, so move the ones you use to the right.

1. Hold down Command.
2. Drag an icon left or right along the menu bar and let go.
3. Put the icons you check every day near the clock, and the ones you can live without near the notch.

On the test Mac the new order stuck: we quit the test app, opened it again, and its icons came back where we had dragged them.

Switch off the icons you never use

macOS 27 puts all of this in one place: System Settings, then Menu Bar.

System Settings, Menu Bar. Untick an Apple control here and its icon leaves the menu bar; it stays in Control Center.

• Apple's own icons, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Battery, Focus and Now Playing, have a checkbox under Menu Bar Controls. Untick one and it leaves the menu bar but stays in Control Center.
• Other apps' icons are listed under Allow in the Menu Bar, further down the same page. Turn one off and, in Apple's words, it is prevented "from ever appearing in the menu bar". The app keeps running.
• Inside the app. Many apps also have their own Show in menu bar setting, and that is the gentler switch when you still want the app. Crest's is in Settings, General: Show Crest in the menu bar.

Further down the same page: a switch for every app that has put an icon in the menu bar.

Tighten the spacing between icons

This one is not in System Settings. Two hidden settings set the gap between icons and the padding around each one. Open Terminal and paste:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 6
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 6

Then log out and back in. Each app reads the setting when it starts, so apps that were already running keep the old spacing until they restart.

Normal spacing above, spacing 6 below. Each icon took 38 points, then 28. Eight test icons fit where six did.

What it did on the test Mac: every icon-sized item went from 38 points to 28, about a quarter narrower. In the space the Mac had free beside its own icons, six test icons fit before and eight after. Apple does not document these two settings, so treat them as a tweak that a future update could ignore. To undo it, paste these and log out again:

defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing
defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding

Menu bar managers: Ice and Bartender

If you have more icons than any of this can fit, a menu bar manager hides the ones you choose and brings them back on demand. We did not install either on the test Mac.

• Ice is free and open source (GPL-3.0) and needs macOS 14 or later. Its README lists a separate bar for hidden icons "for MacBooks with the notch". The last full release, 0.11.12, is from October 2024, and the newest build, 0.11.13-dev.2 from September 2025, is marked as a pre-release. Its issue list has open reports about macOS 26.
• Bartender is paid, with a 4-week trial, sold as a one-time licence or a yearly Pro plan. Its site says Bartender 7 "is built for macOS 27" and can "automatically hide items that would be hidden by the notch, and bring them back with a click or hotkey". On macOS 26 it points you to Bartender 6.

On macOS 27 the built-in arrows cover the basic case for free, so try them first.

Or move what those icons show into the notch

A lot of menu bar icons exist to show one small thing: CPU load, a battery, the next meeting, the weather. Crest puts those in widgets that open from the notch, so the icons can go. Its System widget shows CPU, memory and network, Batteries shows the Mac and your headphones and mouse, and there are Calendar and Weather widgets too. Those four are part of Crest Pro; Now Playing, the Shelf and the Clipboard are free. Crest adds one icon of its own, which you can switch off in its Settings, General.

Download Crest if you want to try it. Free tier, no account · 7-day Pro trial, no card · macOS 14 or later

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Keep reading: Hide the notch · MacBook Neo and the notch · Notch dimensions by model · Crest vs TopNotch · Dynamic Island for Mac · Facts and prices · Crest overview