Technical Q&A TB54

Moving the Menu Bar

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.

Further Reference:

Inside Macintosh: Menu Manager
Display Manager documentation
Human Interface Guidelines

[Dec 22 1998]