How to rearrange menu bar icons on macOS

Short answer: hold Command, then drag any menu bar icon left or right to reorder it. Drag it downward out of the bar to remove it. This works for Apple's icons and most third-party ones, and macOS remembers the order across restarts.

The basic move#

1. Hold ⌘ Command.
2. Click and hold an icon in the menu bar.
3. Drag it left or right. The other icons shuffle to make space.
4. Release.

That is the whole mechanic. No setting to enable, no app required.

Why the order matters more than it looks#

On a notched MacBook, position is priority. When status items do not fit beside the camera housing, macOS drops the leftmost ones first — silently, with no indicator.

So the icons you actually need should sit as far right as possible, next to the clock and Control Center. Anything parked on the far left is first in the queue to disappear. Reordering costs ten seconds and is the cheapest insurance against icons vanishing behind the notch.

A sensible right-to-left order:

1. Clock and Control Center (fixed by macOS, always rightmost)
2. Battery, Wi-Fi — things you read at a glance
3. Apps you click several times a day
4. Everything else

Removing an icon#

Hold Command and drag the icon downward, out of the menu bar. Release, and it disappears with a puff.

Two caveats:

• Some apps redraw their icon immediately, because they manage it themselves. For those, the setting is inside the app — usually something like "Show icon in menu bar".
• For Apple's own icons, the reliable route is System Settings → Control Center, where each one has a Show in Menu Bar / Don't Show in Menu Bar control.

Icons that will not move#

A few refuse to budge:

• Control Center and the clock are pinned to the right edge and cannot be reordered.
• Some third-party items re-insert themselves at a fixed position on every launch.
• A menu bar manager's own items — the divider and toggle in Pelmet, Ice, or Hidden Bar — may resist being dragged past each other, since their positions are what make the hiding work.

If an icon will not move at all, quit the app, drag the neighbouring icons into the arrangement you want, then relaunch it.

Doing it with a menu bar manager#

If you use Pelmet, Command-drag is also how you decide what gets hidden. Pelmet puts a ╱ divider in the bar:

[hidden icons…]  ╱  [always-visible icons…]  ‹  clock

• Drag an icon to the right of the ╱ and it is always visible.
• Leave it to the left and it collapses when you press ⌥⌘B.

There is no separate settings screen for this — the arrangement is the configuration, using the same Command-drag you would use anyway.

Lost the divider? Right-click Pelmet's chevron and choose Reset Divider Position.

Making the order stick#

macOS stores status item positions per user, and they normally survive logout and restart. Two things disrupt them:

• Running two menu bar managers at once. Both write positions, and they overwrite each other. Run one.
• An app updating its bundle identifier, which macOS treats as a new item and re-seeds at the default position.

If your layout keeps resetting, check for the first case before anything else.