[nozzlegear]

I run into it when using Rider. I have text size increased on my Macbook and Rider has 8000 menu items, so my menu icons (all of which are default macOS, no third-party stuff) will be hidden to make room for Rider's stuff. I have to switch over to another workspace or window (i.e. away from Rider) if I want to access one of them. It's annoying but I'm not sure who I blame here; Rider I guess, for having a zillion menu items.

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/8y0QbZN

The gap between "Run" and "Tests" is the notch, which I don't usually notice is there unless I'm in Rider.

[whimblepop]

Why not blame Apple for having a busted-ass menu bar design? The behavior of "if the menu is busy, icons just disappear" and advice like "apps shouldn't rely on menu bar icons" are just bad ideas. They don't work well with how people use computers or how developers write apps. It's a bad design.

[nozzlegear]

I prefer to blame Rider because it's the only app where I encounter this problem, and it seems more like a "don't make your list of menu entries so long it spans the notch and pokes into the menu icons" error than anything else to me. Simple as.

[whimblepop]

Unfortunately for me, notch overflow happens to me in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, VSCode, Outlook, Excel (and Word and probably all of the other Microsoft Office apps), LibreOffice, IINA (mpv frontend), CotEditor, IDEA, and QtCreator, just among those installed on my work machine.

> Simple as.

Neither Apple nor app developers control either what font sizes a user needs or how many apps they're running which produce menu bar icons. In that context, "not so long that it [...] pokes into the menu icons" isn't even well-defined. It's literally meaningless unless you parameterize it according to factors like those, which is not "simple as" anything.

It's a computer screen, not a page in some particular print magazine.

> it seems more like a "don't make your list of menu entries so long it spans the notch and pokes into the menu icons"

Only counting menu bar items that either (a) come with the operating system or (b) are imposed on me by applications that my employer forces me to run for compliance or other purposes, there are eleven mandatory icons in my menu bar at all times. So it doesn't matter whether the app in focus has few menu items or many; I run into this issue regardless.

> I prefer to blame Rider

There are a few ways to make sense of the situation, but none of them look great for Apple tbh.

If the menu bar is well designed but it doesn't work well with increased display scaling, accessibility is a second-class (or worse) concern in Apple's design.

If the menu bar is well designed but it doesn't work well when there are dozen menu bar icons, then it isn't suitable for environments where users don't control the number of menu bar icons they have to deal with— this, of course, is many professional environments.

So either: macOS isn't genuinely intended to be accessible, macOS isn't a general-purpose operating system for professionals, the menu bar has a bad design, or some combination of all three.

Of the three, "the menu bar's design is bad" seems the simplest and least absurd.