A menu extra, menu item, menulet, or status item is a

graphical control element A graphical widget (also graphical control element or control) in a graphical user interface is an element of interaction, such as a button or a scroll bar. Controls are software components that a computer user interacts with through direct ...

in macOS. It is a small indicator that appears at the right of the

menu bar A menu bar is a graphical control element which contains drop-down menus. The menu bar's purpose is to supply a common housing for window- or application-specific menus which provide access to such functions as opening files, interacting wi ...

. They often provide quick ways to use applications (e.g. iChat) or display information (for example the system clock), or control system-level variables (for example audio volume). There are a number of third-party menu items available. Menu extras are similar to items in the

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

notification area but are less common. There are many menu extras supplied with macOS, many independent third-party menu extra applications, and many more supplied with 3rd-party products, most of which are installed from their parent application or system preferences pane, and may remain dormant until they are notified of an event (for example, Inkwell's menu extra will come and go when a graphics tablet is connected and disconnected). While macOS provided no centralized tool to enable or configure menu extras, some of them can be rearranged and dragged off the menubar while depressing the ⌘ key. Also, all Apple-supplied menu extras can be found in the folder /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras. Yet, a centralized tool is in the "Dock and menu bar" preference pane of the System Preferences. Menu extras were introduced with Mac OS X v10.1 to replace

Dock A dock (from Dutch language, Dutch ''dok'') is the area of water between or next to one or a group of human-made structures that are involved in the handling of boats or ships (usually on or near a shore) or such structures themselves. The ex ...

extras (docklings), and may thus be viewed as another attempt to bring the Control Strip to OS X. There was some controversy when they were originally introduced due to Apple providing an API for third-party developers to use to create menu extras using the NSStatusItem class, while Apple used another private class called NSMenuExtra to develop their own menu extras. Menu extras based on NSMenuExtra automatically included a number of extra features not available to NSStatusItem-based extras, such as drag and drop install/uninstall and the ability to rearrange the extras by depressing the ⌘ key and dragging. The given reason for this is that NSMenuExtra-based menu extras operate within the address space of the SystemUIServer so faulty code in a menu extra could cause instability in a core part of the operating system. In Mac OS X 10.4, Spotlight was introduced with a different icon, that is not technically a menu extra, locked to the right corner of the menu bar. OS X 10.8 introduced

Notification Center Notification Center is a feature in iOS and macOS that provides an overview of alerts from applications. It displays notifications until the user completes an associated action, rather than requiring instant resolution. Users may choose what a ...

in a similar fashion, and

macOS 10.12 macOS Sierra (version 10.12) is the thirteenth major release of macOS (formerly known as and ), Apple Inc.'s desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. The name "macOS" stems from the intention to uniform the operating syst ...

similarly introduced Siri.

References

External links

Building NSMenuExtra - A Small Tutorial
- article written by Rustam Muginov for Cocoa Dev Central

- Apple developer documentation for NSStatusItem
MacMenuBar
- list of menu extras, currently updated
Menulets
- list of menu extras (last updated 2013)
OS X menubar items
- extensive list of menu extras (last updated 2009)
Managing OS X Menu Extras
- tutorial and video demonstration that shows you how to add/delete and rearrange OS X menu extras {{Mac OS X MacOS user interface Graphical control elements