29 comments

[ 32.2 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] thread
Great now just need the same for the window corners and ridiculous Finder overlays.
There's actually a built in way to remove them in settings. System Settings -> Menu Bar.

You can uncheck or drag items around in the menu bar and group some inside of the menu bar control (and even create new menu bar controls).

I wish you could add third party apps to them, maybe that'll be next. But it's nice you can hide any apps icon right there.

Usually I like Apple’s OS updates but Tahoe is absolutely awful from the glass to the noddy sizing of everything. MacOS does not have to harmonise with VisionOS at all and it’s been a disaster for macOS to try.
(comment deleted)
I still miss launchpad. Which is made worse by the fact the spotlight has become terrible.

Safari is unusable due to some weird sync that happens whenever I open a new window ( i dont use tabs) and adding bookmarks takes about 10-15 seconds.

Please Apple, help? Apple seem to have lost their cultish drive to satisfy UI obsessive like me who often didn't even know what we wanted until they gave it to us. Now, we know what we want, but Apple can't give it to us.

Oh, thank you for posting this. Just ran the Terminal command and it’s a vast improvement.
I was really happy when they added the pictures! Dyslexia, the icons are 100% faster for me, I don't use those menus often enough to know what is in there word wise, but I can read the icons super fast.
After a good decade of Mac Tahoe made me go back to Linux + tiling WM for my main machine. I just could not stand the awful mess anymore.

Result? inner peace. It is so calm here, and everything is so familiar and fast.

And the MBP hardware seems to be getting shittier too :/ have trackpad issues on both my latest personal and work M4 MBPs.

Currently I’m blocking the Tahoe updates with Little Snitch. If that becomes untenable I’ll just run Sequoia in a VM.
I use Linux at home and MacOS at work; I am quite fond of every visual change in Tahoe with sole the exception of the obscenely large radius rounded window corners which make no sense on a rectangular screen and make resizing windows a relatively slow and arduous task. I really wish they could be disabled.
I never noticed the icons were even there until I read this.
"apps will respect this change after relaunching" ...? I'm not seeing that happen. restart required?
> I really dislike Apple’s choice to clutter macOS Tahoe’s menus with icons.

> It makes menus hard to scan

I disagree, I like them, and I'm glad there's an option

With billions of users, it doesn't make sense to offer just one style for everything for everyone, like all the OSes are these days. Hell the Switch and Switch 2 still doesn't have much options beyond Bright/Dark mode.

The only actual solution is customizability; let users fuck themselves up however they want, but always leave a quick "Reset to Defaults" panic button within reach :)

I just want brushed metal Aqua with Lucida Grande back. Seems to be too much to ask for.
Great. Thank you for sharing this tip!
With all these commandline and registry hacks to make macOS and Windows bearable, why not use Linux? You will also have to use the commandline if you want total customizability, but at least the OS doesn't actively fight you.
I use my Mac for film scoring and music production, so I have a long-standing practice of keeping my operating system one major version behind for stability reasons. If you want to do the same and at the same time avoid those annoying Tahoe update notifications then simply enable beta updates for OS 15 in settings. I don’t imagine I’ll ever update to Tahoe because I dislike the UI so much but honestly OS 15 is rock solid and it looks great, I’d be very happy sticking with it until EOL for this machine.
What option do I use if I want to disable the icons only in some cases?
Something to think about for Apple fans:

Why should OS presentation be tightly coupled to kernel version?

Or why should it even be coupled to the vendor of the hardware?

And you can ask the same question about content filters, app stores, ...

Nice, except it doesn't work in Safari. Some are hidden in the Edit menu but most are still there.