How can I show the menu bar on all displays in macOS?

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Level 1

4 points

How can I show the menu bar on all displays in macOS?

i'm using mac (macOS 15.2) for development.

i have 2 requirements:

i want each desktop have its own spaces for all montiors (and not each montior managing its own spaces), similar to how it is in windows.
i want to see menu bar on each display, and the menu bar should show deatils for the focus app *in the display*.

apparently, this is not possible to show menu bar on all displays when 'displays have seperate spaces' is disabled. this is completely dumb and against all intuition, who designed this?

macOS appears to be the worst choice ever for development computer.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 15.2

Posted on Jan 18, 2025 4:51 AM

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Answer 1

a brody

Level 10

84,287 points

Jan 18, 2025 8:21 AM in response to eliav2

No one here has the inside scoop on who made that decision.

But as a developer you can sign on http://developer.apple.com/ and make a bug report through their feedback system. You will be subject to their non-disclosure agreement, and not able to report those bugs on this community here.

One thing you might want to consider is develop for X11. That does have the option to build menu widget windows based on the BSD system. http://www.sourceforge.net is an excellent repository of Mac compatible open source software using X11.

Historically Apple's menubar is a holy grail for the Mac platform, where unlike Windows and some Unix platforms there is just one menubar for the active foreground application, and the menubar always has altered to represent that menubar. While I can certainly see where the flexibility of having more than one application with its own menubar can be useful, it can also be counterproductive for people who enjoy the Mac interface intuitive design. The KISS principle weighs heavily into that design. In fact until 15 years ago, almost no applications hid the menubar, except some games. This made it difficult to quit those programs if they misbehaved.

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