When Apple released macOS 11.0 “Big Sur” back in 2020, one of the changes they made was to increase the gap between icons on the menubar. During development the gap was enormous, but it was eventually toned down for release, based on the negative feedback during testing.

People with a lot of menubar apps found the icons took up too much space, so tools like Bartender became popular to help keep things under control. Later when Apple released the first MacBooks with a notch, people even found their icons disappearing underneath it!

So what can we do about that?

The first thing to do is look to see if any icons can be removed, for example with things like battery life and volume being accessible in Control Centre, maybe you don’t want discrete icons for those? You can quickly remove them by holding Command (⌘) and then dragging the icons off the menubar.

Mind the gap

Once you’ve removed any unnecessary icons, you can modify some hidden macOS settings to reduce the gap between each icon, so they don’t take up as much space. Simply open a Terminal window, and run the following commands:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int <integer>
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int <integer>

You’ll then need to log out and back in for the changes to take effect.

I found values of 8 and 6 looked best to my eye, but you can experiment with different integer values to find your favourite.

Undo

You can easily restore the default setting at any time with the following commands:

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

Don’t forget to log out and back in again for the changes to take effect.

Enjoy!