Short answer: macOS pads every menu bar status item with a fixed amount of space on each side. Two hidden defaults settings — NSStatusItemSpacing and NSStatusItemSelectionPadding — reduce that padding, which typically buys room for two or three extra icons. Combine it with a scaled display resolution and moving system icons into Control Center.
Where the space actually goes
A menu bar icon is not just its glyph. Each status item is a small view with padding on both sides, plus the highlight area that appears when you click it. With a dozen icons, that padding adds up to a meaningful fraction of the bar — and on a notched MacBook, that is the exact budget you are fighting for.
There are four levers, in rough order of effect:
- Scaled display resolution
- Removing icons you do not need
- Tightening the per-item padding
- Hiding the rest behind a manager
Lever 1: a scaled resolution
System Settings → Displays → Resolution → More Space.
Everything on screen gets smaller in points, so more menu titles and status items fit beside the notch. This is the single biggest win, and the trade-off is honest: smaller text everywhere. Step down one option at a time rather than jumping to the smallest.
Lever 2: remove what you do not read
Every icon you remove is width you get back.
- System Settings → Control Center — set Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, AirDrop, Screen Mirroring, Focus, Sound and Now Playing to Don't Show in Menu Bar unless you read them at a glance. They stay one click away in Control Center.
- Clock Options in the same panel — dropping the date, or seconds, or switching to a 24-hour format, narrows the widest item in the bar.
- System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions — quit the menu bar apps you have not deliberately opened in a year.
Lever 3: tighten the padding
macOS reads two undocumented global preferences that control status item padding. Setting them lower reclaims a few points per icon.
In Terminal:
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 6
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 6
killall SystemUIServer
The defaults are larger than 6; values between 4 and 8 are a reasonable range. Lower values pack icons tighter but make them harder to hit accurately.
To undo it completely and return to Apple's defaults:
defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing
defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding
killall SystemUIServer
Two things to know. Some status items are drawn entirely by their own app and ignore these values, so the effect varies with what you run. And because the keys are undocumented, Apple can change or remove them in any macOS release — if a command appears to do nothing on your version, that is the likely reason, not a mistake on your part.
Pelmet automates this under Settings → Make Room…, alongside the other levers on this page, so you do not have to remember the commands or the restore steps.
Lever 4: hide the rest
Past a certain number of menu bar apps, no amount of spacing will help — you have more icons than bar. At that point the answer is to stop showing them all at once.
A menu bar manager puts a divider in the bar and collapses everything on one side of it. Pelmet does this with an expanding-spacer technique that needs no permissions at all: Command-drag the icons you always want visible to the right of its ╱ divider, and press ⌥⌘B to collapse the rest.
It also does something none of the alternatives do — when icons still do not fit beside the notch after all of the above, it shows a +N badge and names the missing items instead of letting them vanish silently.
A realistic order of operations
- Switch to a More Space resolution and see whether that alone solves it.
- Strip system icons you do not read out of the menu bar via Control Center.
- Shorten the clock.
- Apply the spacing defaults, or use Pelmet's Make Room….
- Install a menu bar manager for whatever is left.
Steps 1–3 are free, reversible, and usually enough on their own for a 14-inch MacBook. Step 5 is what makes the problem stop coming back.