I have a couple of different menubar menus for Finder and Safari. But many times when activating one of those apps it only shows 1 menu, so I very often have to switch to a different app to make all menus appear. Is there anyone else who has this problem?
Can you use some trick to force update every 30 seconds or something else?
Macos 26.5.2 and Keyboard Maestro 11.1.1
When you say “I have menubar menus” I’m not sure if you are talking about KM palettes, or macOS “pin in menu bar”, or third party utilities. I would need more information to be able to help. Perhaps a screenshot would show us which method you are using. I apologize for asking for clarification.
Yes. I have the group setting to show active macros in a menubar menu when the app is active. Is there perhaps an action instead to show menubar menu instead, like with show palette. Maybe it works better with application activated as a trigger.
That helps to clarify a lot. I suspect that if the problem is “many times when activating one of those apps it only shows 1 menu” then that problem is caused by the fact that the macros in your group are specifically configured to be not active when a different app is in focus. That’s probably why they show up only when you activate the app first. You don’t need “a trick to force update”, what you need to do is carefully re-examine why your macros are not active when a different app is in focus, and fix it that way.
I’m not always the clearest explainer here. But do you understand what I’m saying?
Could be that i made a change to have safari window contains condition, and still had finder as an app for the safari menu. Even though i didnt use it for finder anymore, it might have created a conflict when going from finder to safari. But another thing also that im wondering if anyone else has problems with is the location of the menubar menu icons. My menubar tend to get large gaps between the icons, dont have that with other apps.
That’s a separate problem. That problem is caused by macOS. You can temporarily fix this by dragging the icons to the left or right by clicking CMD-MouseClickAndDrag. The icons may get misplaced later, typically when you login or reboot. This isn’t a KM problem.
As for your original problem, my description above is the best I can do to explain it. If my solution doesn’t work, you may need to provide a lot more information, or perhaps the entire macro groups themselves.
Are you using any menubar management apps like Bartender or Barbee? They caused problems like this for me, so I got rid of them.
Im using Better Touchtool with the hide menubar items to the left of Better Touchtool icon, with trigger to unhide/hide. Might be that.
Possibly, yeah. Ever since Sequoia, menubar apps started misbehaving for me. I'm on Tahoe now and the new native visibility controls will have to do!
I could not agree more, they all suffer from one or more of menu items i) disappearing ii) improperly spaced iii) wrongly ordered iv) jumping all over the place, and more.
I have -- sadly, because I liked their functionality -- abandoned them entirely!
Hi, I’m having the same issues on my Mac (M2 Mac mini, macOS 26.6.1).
For a long time, I happily and conveniently used the "Display in menu bar" feature offered by KM—with or without the three available sub-options. Unfortunately, however, the menu bar items kept shifting position. Sometimes there were inexplicable gaps between the icons! It was very annoying.
So, I moved all my app-specific KM macros to the "Status Menu trigger" option, and the situation is much more stable now.
I’ve ended up leaving only the KM icon itself in the menu bar...
Are you aware that you can move the icons manually with your mouse using CMD-CLICK?
Are you aware of this other thread on the subject, where Peter explains that the Menu Bar is not something that KM can manipulate:
Since a person can move the icons with the mouse, I'm starting to think about ways I could get a macro to move the icons in an automated fashion. Like you, I would like this problem solved. I'm going to think about it today.
I discovered that Better touchtools can actually save the menubar layout and restore. But the problem is when you use app enabled menus with KBM so the number of icons changes.
I have spent 3 hours digging very deep into this problem, using Swift to investigate the Menu Bar, right down to the Quartz layer, and I have some interesting conclusions which I will send to the developer of KM. I could be wrong, but I think there's a way to solve this.