Rearrange Your Menubar Icons

Updated July 4th, 2016.

Seems as though the icons in my menubar are multiplying. I know what they are but I don’t remember putting them there. (In fact, I didn’t put them there– most were placed there automatically, during the initial installation of various programs.) Regardless of how they got there, now I want to rearrange them.

But how? You can’t just click on them and drag them around… can you?

It turns out that you can. But you have to hold the Command key down while you do it.

Using the Command key trick I was able to rearrange the icons in my menubar in just a few seconds.

I started with this:

(Click the picture for a larger version)
And I ended up with this:

(Click the picture for a larger version)
Not a gigantic improvement but I like it. And it’s so easy.

Caution: if you hold the Command key down and click on an icon in the menubar you should be careful NOT to drag the icon down, away from the menubar. If you do drag it down, don’t let go– unless you want to remove that icon from the menubar. There is always a way to get the icon back if you do remove it but it’s easier to just be careful.

In case you’re wondering: no, you can’t rearrange the menus themselves. That is, you can’t put Edit before File, and Help before that. I know you’ll try but I’m telling you it won’t work.

Note: not every icon is movable using the Command key technique. Here, I’m not able to move Evernote’s elephant icon, and I’m also not able to move LogMeIn’s gray circle with dots. Most of the other icons will be draggable– expect it to work and be surprised when it doesn’t.

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