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There are 26 items come along with your Mac OS X that can be attached onto your menu bar. Here is the shortcut to show them all on your menu bar.

Perhaps you have read the new book by David Pogue, The Missing Manual : Mac OS X - Leopard Edition. There is inside written the complete list of all Leopard menu bar items and how to attach them onto your menu bar.

Display All in Once


Unfortunately, it's too tedious for me to go through each and activate them separately. If you're like me, I believe you will follow these quick steps to activate all of those menu extras all in once.

  • Go inside Mac HD ▸ System ▸ Library ▸ CoreServices ▸ Menu Extras
  • Highlight all items, that have .menu as their extension, inside. You can use keystrokes A
  • Right-Click on one of them and select Open. Similarly, you can also use O
  • Now you can relax and see all of them being displayed on your menu bar one by one

Frequently Asked Question?


What are those Menu Extras?

AirPort, Battery, Bluetooth, Clock, CPU, Displays, Eject, Fax, HomeSync, iChat, Ink, IrDA, PCCard, PPP, PPPoE, RemoteDesktop, Script Menu, Spaces, Sync, TextInput, Universal Access, User, Verizon, Volume, VPN, and WWAN.

Are all of them shown on the menu bar?

Not all of them are shown. For example, my PowerMac G5 won't display Battery status because there is no battery connected.

Are they useful?

Yes, they are. Let's take Displays as example, you can easily change your display resolution without stepping through several troublesome steps via System Preferences Pane.

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8 COMMENTS (RSS)

Paul

February 8th, 2008 Time: 12:32 AM

You can rearrange and remove those newly added icons without going in System Preferences: just Command-click the icon and then either drag it to the position you want in the menu or drag it completely out of the menu (just like how the Dock works, minus the Command part)

1

Alex

February 8th, 2008 Time: 04:54 AM

^ great trick thanks!

2

Tom Bechtel

February 9th, 2008 Time: 03:44 AM

Cool! I've been puzzling how to remove a couple of them. Thanks!

3

Twiz

February 13th, 2008 Time: 02:45 AM

hey how do u remove them???

4

Joel in Ky

February 16th, 2008 Time: 11:45 PM

the easiest way to remove the items is to hold down the command key and click-drag them off individually.

5

Kevin

February 25th, 2008 Time: 01:27 PM

What if one menu item (say .Mac) has somehow been added to the menu bar, but the icon doesn't show. When you move your mouse left from the search button, the .Mac menu appears. How would you remove that from the menu bar?

6

surfnux

March 11th, 2008 Time: 01:59 PM

If we were to let these menus out, will it affect the start up time? And what about the RAM utilization? Any side effects?

7

JC

May 5th, 2008 Time: 01:44 PM

I tried Ink.menu - and it didn't do anything.
But I'm glad I could put an eject button right up there. Very useful.

8

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