Mac guides

Every way to hide menu bar icons on a Mac: System Settings in macOS 26 and 27, ⌘-dragging icons off the bar, app settings, the macOS 27 overflow arrow, and menu bar managers.

A practical way to tidy a crowded Mac menu bar: audit what's there, remove what you never use, order what's left, and deal with icons lost behind the MacBook notch.

What to look for in a Mac menu bar manager after macOS 27 changed the menu bar, and how the built-in options, Bartender, Thaw, Ice, Hidden Bar, and Softset Bar compare.

Why menu bar icons disappear on a Mac, usually behind the MacBook notch or switched off in Menu Bar settings, and how to get them back.

Put windows side by side or in quarters on a Mac with macOS's built-in tiling, its keyboard shortcuts and settings, and what window managers add.

Two ways to put apps side by side on a Mac: full-screen Split View, and tiling windows on the desktop. Steps for macOS 27, resizing, swapping, and exiting.

Set up text shortcuts on your Mac with the built-in Text Replacements, learn where they work and where they don't, and when a text expander app is worth it.

What a Mac text expander actually does when you type an abbreviation: keyboard event taps, Accessibility permission, secure input, pasting versus typing, and why some apps behave differently.

How to choose a text expander for Mac: the built-in option, TextExpander, Typinator, aText, Espanso, Raycast snippets, and Softset Type: what each is good at and how you pay.

A step-by-step way to find what's making your Mac slow using Activity Monitor: CPU, memory pressure, energy, and disk, and how to tell a real problem from normal behaviour.

How to see how much memory your Mac has and uses, what the numbers in Activity Monitor mean (app memory, wired, compressed, cached, swap), and which ones matter.

Memory pressure is macOS's own measure of whether your Mac has enough RAM. What green, yellow, and red mean, how compression and swap fit in, and what to do when it's high.

Why macOS shows most of your memory as used, when that's normal, when it isn't, and the usual causes of high memory use: browsers, leaks, dev tools, and VMs.

kernel_task showing high CPU in Activity Monitor usually means your Mac is too warm and macOS is cooling it down. What it does, why, and how to find the real cause.

Find the apps draining your MacBook battery with the battery menu, Activity Monitor's Energy tab, and Battery settings, and what to do about them.

What a Mac system monitor should show, what Activity Monitor already covers, and how menu bar monitors like iStat Menus, Stats, and Softset Pulse differ, including options for developers.

Find what's listening on a port like 3000 or 5173 on your Mac with lsof, see which project folder it came from, and stop it safely. Also covers the Activity Monitor way.

The MacBook notch holds the camera, but the space around it can do far more: media controls, a file shelf, timers, calendar, and alerts. What macOS does with it, and what notch apps add.

How to use the clipboard history built into Spotlight since macOS 26, its limits, what clipboard managers add, and how to keep passwords out of your history.

Paste text on a Mac without its original fonts, colours, and links: the Paste and Match Style shortcut, what to do in apps without it, and how to clean text first.