[Feature Request]: All black menu bar background to hide notch

[svoop]

Description

The "tint" setting for the menu bar appearance doesn't allow for the menu bar background to be solid black (and therefore hide the notch).

This is how things look with one of the default color wallpapers:

And after adding a solid black tint with Ice:

Would it be possible/complicated to add the ability to set the background to a solid black like so:

Notch gone :smile:

This would make other tools for just that purpose (e.g. Top Notch or ChangeMenuBarColor) obsolete.

Thanks for considering this... and for Ice! (Just switched and donated to Ice due to the ongoing Bartender concerns.)

Screenshots

No response

[jordanbaird]

Yeah, we could do this. I had previously kind of decided that it wasn't within scope for Ice, but there have been a decent number of requests for this feature, and thinking about it more, it probably actually is within scope.

[leoravagnani]

@jordanbaird doing this via Ice would be the way to go!

Top Notch watches the current wallpaper and then generate a version of the chosen image with a black bar and then set the wallpaper to this new image under the hood. It would not behave correctly for me sometimes when using dynamic wallpapers and just stopped working at all when upgrading to Sonoma and I ditched it. Now I just stick to a mostly black wallpaper to get the same effect but would be nice to have the freedom to change it and still maintain the full black bar.

[jordanbaird]

@leoravagnani Yeah, dynamic wallpapers not working is a limitation of this feature. Unfortunately, changing the wallpaper is the only way macOS will allow the menu bar color to change. But as long as people understand that limitation, and are okay with it, I'm willing to implement it.

[leoravagnani]

@jordanbaird So the tint and styling feature is actually changing the wallpaper then? Or these are different scenarios?

[jordanbaird]

@leoravagnani It's actually overlaying a partially transparent window above the menu bar. There are a lot of things that can be done to the appearance and behavior of a window to remove all the peripheral elements (like the close, minimize, and zoom buttons, borders, title bars, etc.). In fact, that's what the menu bar itself is. So you can think of it as adding a Photoshop layer over the menu bar.

[leoravagnani]

@jordanbaird hmmm got it! so that's why adding a tint makes the icons a bit darker then, and why a 100% opaque tint would not work as it would effectively hide everything beneath. So the only way around hiding the notch would be changing the wallpaper.