Dark Menu Bar in Big Sur

[wstrohm]

Is it possible to lighten up that dark gray menu bar in Big Sur? I can't find anything in System Preferences to do that, and I don't want the automatic hide/show. (Yeah, picky, picky.)

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Is it possible to lighten up that dark gray menu bar in Big Sur? I can't find anything in System Preferences to do that, and I don't want the automatic hide/show. (Yeah, picky, picky.)

There's no specific setting I know of, but the "dark grey" you have is probably a product of what colour your current wallpaper is. The menu-bar is translucent when you have hardware-accelerated graphics and the colour underneath shows through. Here's mine in Dark Mode with a sky-colour background. The menu-bar is a slightly darker version:

Only way around this I can think of is to lighten/re-colour the area of wallpaper underneath the menu-bar? You'd just need an image-editor to do this.

Unless someone else knows better because, hey, I'd like to know too! There might be some third-party utility that can change the native setting, like WinAero Tweaker on Windows.

 

[wstrohm]

My Menu Bar does not appear to be translucent; just a dark grey. As you can see, the desktop varies and is quite light-colored everywhere.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

My Menu Bar does not appear to be translucent; just a dark grey. As you can see, the desktop varies and is quite light-colored everywhere.

View attachment 512106

Okay, understood.

I did some more testing using photos from my library and managed to get mine to go solid grey too:

So maybe the only way to get rid of that grey menu-bar is to change the wallpaper ?

Unless that 3rd-party utility exists...

Sorry I couldn't help.

 

[wstrohm]

Tried the "Big Sur Road" desktop and not only is the menu bar lighter, but it now seems translucent. Guess it does depend on the chosen "wallpaper." Thanks for the insights!

 

[trs96]

Unless someone else knows better because, hey, I'd like to know too! There might be some third-party utility that can change the native setting, like WinAero Tweaker on Windows.

See this video tutorial. Requires Xcode and Swift command line tools.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

See this video tutorial. Requires Xcode and Swift command line tools.

Good find (I do generally watch Mr Nelson's videos but hadn't seen that one).