Customize the Mac Menu Bar Clock Appearance with Emoji in Mac OS X
The Mac menu bar clock isn’t particularly fancy nor is it meant to be, but if you’re a tinkerer and like to customize things, you might find some enjoyment in adding some time-changing emoji characters to the clock as an addition to the standard AM / PM indicators that show up alongside the time.
Adding Emoji into the Mac Menu clock is a subtle customization with no third party utility needed to accomplish, it’s just a simple change you can make yourself through the System Preferences of MacOS and Mac OS X.
How to Customize Mac Menu Clock with Emoji
OK let’s add some fun emoji customization to our Mac menu bar clock, this works the same in all versions of Mac OS that support Emoji:
- Open System Preferences from the Apple menu, and choose the “Language & Region” control panel
- Select the “Advanced” button in the corner
- Choose the “Times” tab
- Look for the “Before noon” and “After noon” sections, then pull down the “Edit” menu and select “Special Characters” to access Emoji
- Drag and drop the emoji you want into their respective places to place them next to the AM / PM indicators in the menu bar clock
When satisfied, choose “OK” to set it. You’ll instantly see the emoji character alongside the clock according to what time it is. For the example shown here, a moon character is used for PM, and a sun character is used for AM, and yes they change automatically when noon and midnight roll around.
Mac OS X has many unique emoji characters to choose from for Mac users, so explore the collection if you’re not into the sun/moon thing. Each tap of the spacebar is also recognized, so you can create gaps in the menu bar by hitting the spacebar repeatedly, or just put tons of emoji in the menu bar if you’re looking to add some decoration and don’t mind your Mac looking a bit kitschy.
One side effect is that you’ll also get the Emoji character placed in the file name of screen shots that are timestamped. You can either accept the emoji as part of the file name, or get around that by changing the default names.
This specific customization won’t work with the analog or 24-hour clock settings, but you could adjust the clocks appearance with different emoji to work with those settings within the same preference panel, they just won’t change throughout the day with the time.
Going beyond the clock, Emoji fans can also customize things further by adding the characters into the Terminal prompt and even within Finder folder names too.
at 1PM see the moon or 1AM see the sun, not like.! :-(
Doing so also adds the Emoji to the list of emails according to the time the email came in. Is that a good thing or does it use up to much space/memory?
The emoji display should have no impact on memory whatsoever, OS X interprets it as a font basically
How about take a f*cking look outside?