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Since macOS 26, one can natively choose to show/hide the menulet (menu bar items) of third-party apps. This is managed in System Settings > Menu bar.

My problem is that System Settings > Menu bar shows me apps that I have deleted (Little Snitch and AlDente, for example). Since the apps are not on the computer anymore, choosing to show their menulet has of course, no effect. While this is not a huge problem, I still would like to clean the System Settings > Menu bar section of all these spurious references.

I used Spotlight and FindAnyFile, hoping to find files that were not uninstalled properly, but with no success. I also rebooted my computer, but this did not solve the problem.

Can I clear this up so that settings only show installed apps in the section for managing the menu bar visibility of installed extensions?

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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This behavior was reported as a bug in the beta versions of Tahoe. Apparently it hasn’t been fixed yet.

As a workaround, you can delete the file

~/Library/GroupContainersAlias/group.com.apple.controlcenter/Library/Preferences/group.com.apple.controlcenter.plist

and log out. This action will reset all menu bar settings to the defaults.

It should also be possible be to edit the above file selectively, though it's likely more trouble than it's worth. Apple seems to have gone out of its way to make it difficult.

The file is a property list with a string-valued key trackedApplications whose value is a base64-encoded property list. That plist has a key-value pair for each application that appears in the settings panel. You would have to decode it, remove the unwanted keys, then re-encode it and paste the resulting string back into the plist named above. Then log out.

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  • Thank you. Do you have a link to the bug report? I will wait a few days in case somebody has a fix. If not I will accept this answer. Commented Sep 18 at 23:34
  • See my updated answer for a (not very useful) solution. Official bug reports are not public. I found the information on various discussion forums other than this one. Commented Sep 19 at 0:39
  • I can verify that the above workaround works. I had the same problem after installing MacOS 26. The Menu Bar Setting window in Settings became real crowded. I installed several apps and then later deleted them for various reasons. The menu bar toggle list became very bloated. Each time there were generic app icons. The apps were deleted and the menu bar icons were gone but the toggle "Artifacts" in the Menu Bar Settings remained. Now I just need to figure out how to get ride of the "Eject" Menu Bar icon. It reappears after every restart or log in. Command-Dragging the icon does not help. It ju Commented Oct 1 at 23:45
  • I ran into a related issue. I’m seeing “ScriptMonitor” in my “Allow in the Menu Bar” list. I already tried resetting the menu bar settings by deleting the file, but it still shows up again. I’m wondering if this is something that comes from macOS itself? Commented Nov 14 at 16:26

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