Show HN: Utility to change macOS Big Sur menu bar color | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Utility to change macOS Big Sur menu bar color

github.com

96 pointsig0r029 comments

I turn off all sorts of animations, movements, and transparencies in iOS and macOS. For the menubar, it goes to my desired theme[1] irrespective of the wallpaper when I set display to “Reduce Transparency”.

  System Preferences > Accessibility > Display ~ Reduce Transparency

1. Dark for Dock, Menu, etc but all others Light.

a. Set theme to Light, then run

b. `defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool Yes`

c. Logout and Choose “Dark Mode".

Off topic, but I love that Apple is still using NS as the prefix; I wonder how long that will last :)

For anyone else who's curious...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/473758/what-does-the-ns-...

> Off topic, but I love that Apple is still using NS as the prefix; I wonder how long that will last :)

If it's lasted this long, probably forever (or until they completely replace OSX).

OS X is replaced, Big Sur is now OS 11

> OS X is replaced, Big Sur is now OS 11

Not really, that's just branding. I'm talking "replaced" like they replaced Classic Mac OS.

Yeah I was being facetious

Hopefully as long as SEO results make including 'Apple' or 'iOS' redundant keywords. NSAnything suggests both when searching for errors and general debugging on StackOverflow.

Thanks!

Another option is to disable transparency under System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Display.

Check "Reduce Transparency" to make your menu bar (and dock) opaque.

I happen to like it better that way.

Agreed, everything is a matter of preference. Disabling transparency was my first try but I did not like the color of the dock with that option so I created the utility.

I actually never want to see the Dock or rarely see it, so hiding it does the trick for me. I use a launcher (Alfred with Powerpack) and Toggle (⌘+tab) if I'm switching apps.

Anyone know of a way to reduce the delay while auto-hiding the menubar? The day I find a way to instantly show the menubar when cursor-hover, I will hide that too.

Is it different from the colour of the dock in the previous versions?

Seriously, I can't fathom why translucency is still being pushed -- for the menu bar and window sidebars.

It was a fad when Windows Vista introduced it. It's not useful at all. It should have disappeared when flat design was introduced, but inexplicably Apple still likes it?

There is no reason for my menu bar to be light blue or light pink or whatever other random color happens to be at the top of my wallpaper, especially when my windows cover up the wallpaper anyways.

I like it. And in general, I like skeumorphism in design.

I love transparency, it looked pretty trash in the vista aero theme because of all the gloss but now I feel like its realizing its true beauty.

It looks nice to me, I love the transparent sidebars especially.

Though I did also like the vista look when it come out.

Thanks for this little tool, the new menu bar in Big Sur is ridiculously transparent! Unfortunately though for those who use tile wallpapers this will not work. I had to manually create a custom screen size tile background with Gimp and then apply the dark bar with this tool.

Has anyone else experienced a performance regression with scrolling in Big Sur? My 2020 MBA used to have perfectly smooth scrolling in every application with Catalina. Now it’s jittery and drops frames all over the place.

Strangely enough, scrolling has improved for me in many apps with my trackball on Big Sur. Scrolling in Messages used to be very difficult to do accurately; now, it works just like Safari.

I haven't tried a touchpad yet, so I wouldn't be surprised if your experience holds true as well.

> Scrolling in Messages used to be very difficult to do accurately

This, the improved search and threads in the Messages app were the main reasons for me to upgrade. The old "webview" Messages that was abandoned for many years very desperately needed that rewrite. It's not perfect right now but it's already way better and it would make sense for it to get more iterations now.

Yes, I also experienced this with my 2020 MBA after updating to Big Sur (via a clean install). Scrolling with the trackpad in Safari was especially terrible at first with jitter and the appearance of dropped frames. This seems to be better the last couple of days for me. It's still not as smooth as it was with Catalina.

Thanks for mentioning that you did a clean install and still experienced the same issue. I did the normal upgrade procedure and was considering doing a clean install but now I see that will be a waste of time. Hopefully this will be something Apple fixes in a point release.

Especially jittery on notification center for me.

see also: Boring Old Menu Bar https://www.publicspace.net/BoringOldMenuBar/

+1 but could you, by any chance, also make the menu bar smaller?

This is a very simple program that just modifies your wallpaper. Making it smaller is a wholly different challenge.

Cant make it smaller but there is a preference option to hide the menu bar in the General preferences pane

No, this utility does not "do" anything to macOS, it just generates a wallpaper that makes the menu bar look the desired color.

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