How to Remove the Shortcuts Menu Bar Icon on Mac
If you want to remove the entire Shortcuts menu bar icon, you’ve probably already tried dragging the item out and removing it the typical way, only to find it not disappear. It turns out if you want to remove the Shortcuts menu bar item on MacOS, you’ll need to take a few extra steps.
We’ll show you how to remove the Shortcuts icon from the menu bar on Mac, and also show you how to remove items from the Shortcuts menu if you simply want to declutter the Shortcuts menu or have found repetitive entries in there.
How to Remove the Shortcuts Menu on Mac
Want to remove the entire Shortcuts menu on the Mac? Here’s how:
- Open the Shortcuts app on Mac
- Choose “Menu Bar” from the sidebar
- Right-click or control-click on every shortcut and choose “Remove from Menu Bar”, repeating until there are no shortcuts shown in the menu bar list
- Now hold down the Command key and drag the Shortcuts menu bar item out of the menu bar until an X appears on the icon, and release
- Quit out of Shortcuts
The Shortcuts menu bar item should now be removed. Some users have to reboot their Mac for the change to take effect, but that shouldn’t be necessary, simply removing all the items and quitting Shortcuts is enough.
Why there is not a simple settings toggle to hide and show the Shortcuts menu bar item is unclear, but perhaps it’s because Shortcuts is from the iOS/iPadOS world as opposed to being a native origin Mac app. Nonetheless, this multistep process for removing the Shortcuts menu bar has caused many users to wonder “why can’t I remove the Shortcuts menu on my Mac?” or think that something isn’t working quite right.
For what it’s worth, the command key and drag trick is how you remove icons from the menu bar on the Mac and it has been that way for a long time, and it turns out it’s also how you can rearrange items in the menu bar as well.
How to Remove Items from the Shortcuts Menu Bar on Mac
You can also just remove single items from the Shortcuts menu bar if you’d rather not remove the entire menu icon:
- Open the Shortcuts app on Mac if you haven’t done so already
- Choose “Menu Bar” from the left side panel
- Locate the shortcut workflow that you want to remove from the menu bar, then right-click or control-click on the item and choose “Remove from Menu Bar”
- Repeat with additional shortcuts if you want to remove those from the menu bar as well (remember if you remove all items you can then remove the entire menu bar icon itself)
There you go, you’ve cleaned up your Shortcuts menu bar items on the Mac.
Note that if you remove all items from the “Menu Bar” panel of Shortcuts, then quit the Shortcuts app or reboot the Mac, the entire Shortcuts menu will be removed.
Shortcuts is an interesting app for automating various tasks that originated on the iPhone and iPad, but now has been brought to the Mac as what appears to be an eventual Automator replacement, despite missing most of the features and capabilities that made Automator so versatile, powerful, and popular to pro Mac users. You can check out more of the cool stuff you can do with Shortcuts here if it interests you.
