How to Hide & Show the Menu Bar in Mac OS X

New versions of OS X allow Mac users to hide and show the menu bar at the top of the screen automatically, much like the Dock can be hidden and shown with a mouse over.

Auto-hiding the menu bar is a nice feature for Mac users who are fans of minimalist desktop appearances, as it really eliminates just about everything visible on the screen aside from whatever the applications and windows are actively open on the display.

How to Automatically Hide & Show the Menu Bar in Mac OS X

You’ll need OS X 10.11 or later to have this option in preferences:

1. Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu or with Spotlight

2. Go to the “General” preference panel”

3. Check the box for “Automatically hide and show the menu bar” to have the effect instantly take effect

When the menu bar is hidden, a quick mouse hover to the top of the display will reveal the menu bar, just like the same action makes the Mac Dock appear if it’s hidden too (which is also a great tip).

You can see the menu bar hiding and showing automatically in the animated gif below:

Making the Menu Bar in OS X Visible or Invisible with defaults Command

Finally, for more advanced users who wish to use a defaults command string at the terminal, you can hide and show the menu bar with the following:

Enable automatically hide the menu bar in OS X:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain _HIHideMenuBar -bool true

Disable automatically hiding menu bar in OS X:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain _HIHideMenuBar -bool false

You may need to log out and back in or kill SystemUIServer for the change to take effect in some cases.

Note: If you’re not on El Capitan 10.11 or newer, you can still hide and show the menu bar with this trick, which works all the way back to Snow Leopard, but requires the usage of a third party tool.

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