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So, this is my question: how do I hide some (or all) of the menus from my menu bar in OS X. A lot of the applications I use have very large menus that I never or very rarely actually use (I know the keyboard shortcuts for the functions I need). On the other hand the right side of the menu bar is useful, since it gives me access to things like wifi and bluetooth status, vpn connections, caffeine, etc. Unfortunately the menus take a lot of space and overlap with the menulets and hide them, especially on a small laptop screen. Sometimes I won't even be able to see the time, if the application is particularly bad about the number of menus.

So, I would like to either hide all menus completely (and then use something like MenuPop in case I actually need one of those functions) or have the menulets on the right take precedence in being displayed rather than the menus on the left. Any ideas?

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Most programs define their menu bar items in an Interface Builder/Xcode resource file with the .nib or .xib file extension. You cannot completely remove the menu items without losing the menu item functionality (e.g. pressing Cmd-Q would no longer quit), but you can rename the menu bar items. – Daniel Beck Jan 22 at 22:10
Ok, this is helpful, a place to start if nothing else. However, I tried and opened the MainMenu.nib bundle from Firefox.app in Interface Builder, but it only has one button, so the rest of the menu has to be somewhere else. – Vlad Seghete Jan 23 at 20:02
Yeah. Firefox is cross platform and not a well-integrated OS X application. You'll probably also fail to assign custom keyboard shortcuts via System Preferences » Keyboard » Applications. Other examples include Eclipse (cross-platform), and pretty much everything by Microsoft (they roll their own solution). But Firefox is open source, that means you can just chance it yourself! ;) – Daniel Beck Jan 23 at 20:08
In other words, menus are very application-dependent. Well, that's a bit of a bother. Maybe I'll just play around and try and change things for the ones that annoy me the most. – Vlad Seghete Jan 24 at 23:09
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