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On a huge monitor (or multiple monitors) it's quite a round trip (I pack a lunch) to move the mouse pointer from a window near the bottom of the screen all the way up to the top of the monitor to select something from a menu and all the way back down to the window.

I know I could move the window closer to the menu, but sometimes I have multiple windows arranged just so.

How can I have the menu appear at the top of the window as it does in at least a few other OS's or WM's?

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6 Answers 6

Reset to default
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Well, there is DejaMenu, which gives you a pop-up menu in-situ that has the same contents as the Menu bar at the top of the screen (especially handy when you're working on the second monitor.)

It used to be possible to get it to run as soon as you pressed the 'roller ball' button on a Mighty Mouse, but that seems to have stopped working since OS X 10.5. That was a nice way to trigger it, but there is an additional tool DMTrigger which will run DejaMenu in the same way.

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This behavior is by design on OS X. The only exceptions are X11 applications. You can customize your OS X menu bar though - you may find this useful.

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As others have noted you can't.

Having the menu bar at the top makes it easy to hit with the mouse (which is, of course a usability win). Of course, then you have to get back to your window (which is not so good).

Think of it as a reason to learn the keyboard shortcuts.

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With the exception of some applications (eg. X11) and such you can't. The "ONE" menu bar is one of the central design tenets of the Mac OS. (And it conveniently plays well with Fitt's Law)

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  • 18
    I don't think Fitts had a very big monitor.
    – Dennis Williamson
    Commented Jul 15, 2009 at 18:13
  • Maybe he knew how to turn on mouse acceleration. Seriously, getting from one side to the other on my Linux desktop at home — with a 3200-pixel-wide display — takes only a small flick of the mouse.
    – derobert
    Commented Jul 15, 2009 at 19:03
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Another idea: Enable Menu Access somewhere in the Accessibility section of your preferences. Now you've got a keyboard shortcut to open the menu. You can navigate them using the arrow keys and select an item with the enter key. No need for the mouse.

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    No need to enable that: there's Ctrl-F2 on every Mac, to move the focus to the menu bar. Once focussed, hit the first letter of menu items to select them. (On notebooks one may want to configure one doesn't need to hold down Fn as well. Or choose another shortcut altogether.)
    – Arjan
    Commented Sep 11, 2009 at 11:53
  • I'm currently not on my mac, so I didn't knew it had not to be enabled. Thanks.
    – Christian Studer
    Commented Sep 11, 2009 at 11:54
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Just found an app that puts the apple menu bar onto the top of an application window. Called "MenuEverywhere". As of my post here it's current for OS X up to Mavericks. https://www.binarybakery.com/menueverywhere.html

And no, I don't have anything to do with that company. Just looking for a solution to this myself, and found the app, and thought it should get added here as an option.

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  • note that this app costs $15
    – Jeff
    Commented Nov 6, 2020 at 23:58

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