Álvaro Ramírez

I'm a fan of macOS's auto-hide menu bar setting. Unless I'm reaching out to a menu item, I don't typically need to have a visible menu bar, so I set auto-hide to "Always".

On rare occasions, I turn this setting off (say for a screen grab). While reaching out to macOS Control Center is OK, I wanted to quickly toggle it from the comfort of Emacs via M-x fuzzy search.

We can leverage AppleScript to toggle the setting on and off. In the past, I would write shell scripts for this kinda thing and invoke from the command line. These days, I dump them into a dwim-shell-command and quickly forget about its implementation. From then on, I just M-x and fuzzy search for some magical incantation (I'm looking at you ffmpeg). I got a bunch of these things…

(defun dwim-shell-commands-macos-toggle-menu-bar-autohide ()
  "Toggle macOS menu bar auto-hide."
  (interactive)
  (dwim-shell-command-on-marked-files
   "Toggle menu bar auto-hide."
   "current_status=$(osascript -e 'tell application \"System Events\" to get autohide menu bar of dock preferences')

if [ \"$current_status\" = \"true\" ]; then
    osascript -e 'tell application \"System Events\" to set autohide menu bar of dock preferences to false'
    echo \"Auto-hide disabled.\"
else
    osascript -e 'tell application \"System Events\" to set autohide menu bar of dock preferences to true'
    echo \"Auto-hide enabled.\"
fi"
   :utils "osascript"
   :silent-success t))

…and that's all there is to it.