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Comment by johnconroy2 | Hacker News Reader

Hold down command and drag to reorder

Control-Click only works for Apple's Menu Bar Extra's, not 3rd party one's, unfortunately. :)

Well, a small correction. Certain ones, most notably iStat Menus, can be moved with command-click.

In the old days, a hack was used to make this work by tricking the system into thinking it was a built-in, but unused, menubar item, often the drawing tablet's status item. I believe this was done through a "haxie", from Unsanity. I'm not sure how iStat Menus does it, but I'd hazard a guess at the same way.

Disclaimer: I'm working off shaky knowledge that I learned three or four years ago, before I was even a dev.

iStat Menus works the same way, yes. The private API is called NSMenuExtra. It's considerably different from NSStatusItem in that NSStatusItems are created by an open application, whereas NSMenuExtras are created by plugins to SystemUIServer. (This makes stability an issue in NSMenuExtras, as one crashy plugin will make the whole status area disappear.)

This makes stability an issue in NSMenuExtras, as one crashy plugin will make the whole status area disappear.

Is that what happens now? They used to make the whole windowserver disappear. Not fun.

I honestly can't understand why Apple doesn't improve support for plain NSStatusItems. There's no reason why they can't have command-drag remove and reordering as well. They're just windows, after all.

Interesting. I wonder if they do it by drawing to Apple's private NSStatusBar-like API instead? I'll have to look into that...

IIRC, 'back in the day' when I was on OSX I remember that the behavior for Apple statusbar apps was different than if you went about it in the kosher, Apple-approved fashion.

It might have been the option-click-drag re-arranging or the option-click-drag-to-desktop to remove from the statusbar (or both of those). Maybe those have since become part of the standard API though.

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