OS X icon tray - how to access icons under menu items

Question

I'm not sure if I am referring to it with the correct terminology, but in the top right bar is a set of icons including battery life, time, wifi etc.

I have quite a few of these but sometimes the menu items for an application encroach across the screen so far that they cover some of the icons.

Is there a way to either reorder the icons so that the one which are important to me are moved to the right, or to scroll the icons to access those under the menu.

I would be interested in primarily any way to do it in OS X, and if this is not possible any free third party solutions.

Here is what my menu bar looks like:

Answer 1

Some icons (at least the battery, Wifi and Date/Time) support dragging and dropping my holding down the command key on your keyboard. You can also drag them off the menu bar to remove them this way.

In this image I am dragging the battery life indicator around.

Answer 2

Bartender is currently in beta and allows you to move applications' menu bar icons to a submenu that opens when clicking the new Bartender menu bar icon. It's a great way to group items you want accessible but don't need to see all the time.

Answer 3

It used to be the case that holding down option (alt) and dragging the icons would allow you to reorder them. Not tried it recently though!

Answer 4

Wow, you've got far too many of those things. Reordering with cmd-click only works with Apple's icons. The order of the other icons is dependent on their load order, so the only way to reorder them is to quit and reopen in the order you want. You could also try reordering them in the Accounts preference pane, where they load from, but I suspect it won't work perfectly.

If I were you, I'd try finding other ways to satisfy your information craving. You could move a few of these to Dashboard (like iStat). Some might work with Growl notifications (gmail). Most of the Evernote stuff is available through keyboard shortcuts, as is Quicksilver. The built in Activity Monitor gives a floating window option. The option to turn these off is generally in the preferences for each application.

Sorry, I hate answers like this, But short of getting a 30 inch monitor, I don't know any other way to get more space on your menubar.