Technical Q&A

TB54 - Moving the Menu Bar (17-December-98)

Q: Under certain conditions, I want to move the menu bar from the main Macintosh display to some other display. Is this possible?

A: We have found that in most cases users find it highly confusing when this is done any other way than through the Monitors & Sound control panel. In general, we like to discourage this sort of thing and instead recommend that developers implement a floating tool palette which the user can move between displays at will; she is likely to understand this better and in all probability will find it more useful, since she'll have control over the palette's placement in both the X and Y axes.

However, there is indeed a function which will allow you to move the menu bar to another display -- assuming you're willing to accept a few more changes than you might like. DMSetMainDisplay, a Display Manager function, sets the main display to an arbitrary display, and a side effect of this is that the menu bar moves to the new main display. However, this causes a lot of window reconfiguration, and Finder icons even move around on the desktop, so we think that doing this is almost always more trouble for the user than it's worth.