Menu bar icon gone, can't reenable it

[tvollstaedt]

Since updating to macOS 26.6.2 the BetterDisplay icon doesn't show up in the menu bar anymore. It worked the day before on the same BetterDisplay version. The OS update went in on 28 Aug in the evening, and the icon has been gone since.

Setup: MacBook Pro M4 Max, macOS 26.6.2 (25G83), BetterDisplay 5.0.4 (53080). Same behaviour on 4.3.6, which is what I was running when it broke.

This isn't about the external monitor. It happens exactly the same way with the MacBook on its built-in display and nothing else attached.

The status item isn't missing, it just never gets drawn. Accessibility reports one item under menu bar 2 of the process with a sensible size of 34x24, but its frame sits outside the row: y = -1, while every other status item on this machine is at y = 3. The x value is off too, either at the far screen edge underneath the clock or outright negative. Positions I measured on differently sized menu bars:

7680 wide, external    {7647, -1}
3840 wide, external    {3807, -1}
1728 wide, built-in    {1522, -1}

The reported frame never matches anything on screen. After toggling the setting off and on once the item reported {1522, 266}, and the latest measurement with the external display attached is {1937, 886}, which is 880 px below the menu bar over plain wallpaper.

To get the usual questions out of the way: "Allow in the Menu Bar" for BetterDisplay is enabled in System Settings, resetting the app under Settings > Application > Additional settings changes nothing, and no menu bar management app is running.

No difference from any of this either: both app versions, a full prefs wipe, a reboot, killing SystemUIServer, relaunching the app while it's already running, every switch under "Menu bar icon options", NSStatusItem Preferred Position (tried 0, 336, 5000), several resolutions. The menu bar is nowhere near full, and there are no crash logs.

One thing that might matter: at some point the app's own "Show app icon in the menu bar" setting had switched itself off without me touching it. Based on your comments in #5416 that sounds like the app reacting to its item being removed. Overall this looks like the same problem as #5633 and #5416, both of which were closed without a documented fix.

Expected: the icon shows up in the menu bar. Actual: the item exists, sits outside the row, never rendered.

Can run more diagnostics if that helps.

[waydabber]

The menu bar icon and its location is fully managed by macOS, the app does not really do anything special with it, so I am not really sure why this happens. Did you try turning the menu bar icon off/on in System Settings? Do you have any app installed that may interfere with menu bar icons somehow?

The app is turning off the "Show app icon in the menu bar" option when macOS reports it as being dragged off by the user (or apparently gets removed by the system or maybe a third party app somehow), but it's not actively changing or managing the icon location in any way - just reacts to the fact that the icon was removed using the methods documented by Apple.

The issues you mentioned were not closed but were converted to discussions. I'll convert this one as well, since after spending much time trying to reproduce or track down this issue (I get 2-3 reports like this every year), I concluded that this is just some kind of "unactionable" macOS bug which appears to affect some users every year (but usually somehow gets resolved by itself), and it's not something I can meaningfully fix.

[tvollstaedt]

Both questions first: yes, I toggled the icon off and on in System Settings, no change. And yes, I had menu bar managers installed. I removed all of them including prefs and login items, rebooted, still no icon.

Here is what the system log shows when the app launches:

15:38:31.324  BetterDisplay  Alloc com.apple.controlcenter.statusitems
15:38:31.326  BetterDisplay  Requesting scene … from com.apple.controlcenter.statusitems
15:38:31.350  ControlCenter  Sending action(s): <NSStatusItemChangeVisibilityAction>
15:38:31.351  BetterDisplay  Received action(s): NSStatusItemChangeVisibilityAction
15:38:31.453  ControlCenter  Scene state did change: XX-None

The item gets created, Control Center takes it, and 26 ms later Control Center sends the visibility change itself. After that the scenes are torn down. The app only reacts to it.

A fresh test user on the same machine shows the icon right away. Both accounts have the same config and one relevant key, NSStatusItem VisibleCC Item-0. It stays 1 for the test user. In my account it goes back to 0 within a second of launch, whatever I set it to before.

Other things I tried, none of them helped: full prefs wipe, the app's own reset, 4.3.6 and 5.0.4, resetting the Control Center prefs, sudo sfltool resetbtm, several reboots. The BTM entry is clean (enabled, allowed, notified).

One thing you could fix on your side no matter what Apple does: without a status item the app menu collapses to a 1x1 window in the bottom corner. It can't be opened at all then, not via the keyboard shortcut and not with the detachable app menu either. A fixed fallback position would keep the app usable. Right now the only way in is the app menu button in the settings window.

[Mimimishesais]

I’m sharing this because I spent way too much time looking for a fix, and I'm hoping this saves someone else a lot of time (and frustration)!
My BetterDisplay menu bar icon suddenly disappeared, even though the app itself was running and had all the necessary permissions. After searching everywhere, I finally figured out the cause, and it’s a pretty bizarre interaction.
It turns out it was caused by the menu bar setting for Terminal. For some reason, the Terminal menu bar switch was actively blocking the BetterDisplay icon.
The fix:
Simply turn on the Terminal menu bar switch. The moment you toggle it on, the BetterDisplay icon pops right back up and everything works like normal again.
If you ever run into this issue and are wondering where your BetterDisplay icon went, I hope this helps!

[Mimimishesais]

My BetterDisplay menu bar icon disappeared even though the app was running. On my Mac, toggling Terminal under System Settings → Menu Bar also controlled whether the BetterDisplay icon appeared.

Turning Terminal on brought the icon back, but that was only a workaround. We eventually found the underlying problem: macOS Control Center had registered BetterDisplay both under its own identity and as a menu item belonging to Terminal.
The affected file
~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.controlcenter/Library/Preferences/group.com.apple.controlcenter.plist

The relevant key is:
trackedApplications

This contains a nested binary plist stored as data, rather than an ordinary directly editable list. Extracting it with plutil -extract trackedApplications raw produces base64, which must be decoded before inspecting the nested plist.
What needs to be removed
Inside that nested plist, locate the record whose:
location.bundle._0 = com.apple.Terminal
Within that record’s menuItemLocations array, remove only the element whose:
bundle._0 = pro.betterdisplay.BetterDisplay
Keep the independent BetterDisplay record, identified by:
location.bundle._0 = pro.betterdisplay.BetterDisplay

Do not delete the entire Terminal record, the entire trackedApplications key, or the BetterDisplay app.
How the repair was performed

1. Quit BetterDisplay and back up the original Control Center plist.
2. Extract and decode trackedApplications into a working copy.
3. Find the Terminal record by its bundle ID and remove only the BetterDisplay element described above.
4. Encode the modified nested plist back into the outer file’s trackedApplications data field.
5. Apply the change to the group-container file at the path above, accounting for macOS’s preference caching. Our repair involved restarting Control Center and cfprefsd.
6. Reopen BetterDisplay, reread the saved registration, and test with Terminal disabled in the menu bar settings.

Important: record positions can change. Do not copy fixed array indexes from someone else’s instructions. Also, a plain defaults write group.com.apple.controlcenter … wrote to ~/Library/Preferences/ during our attempts, rather than updating the actual group-container file.
After the repair, the Terminal record contained zero BetterDisplay references, while BetterDisplay’s own registration remained intact. I then disabled Terminal’s menu bar switch, and the BetterDisplay icon stayed visible.
This fixed the issue on my Mac running macOS 26.6.2. We have not established why macOS created the association in the first place.
Cheers.

[waydabber]

Huhh @Mimimishesais - this is crazy, but you are right. When I toggle "Terminal" off, my BetterDisplay menu bar icon goes away indeed, and comes back, when I enable it.

I think this ever happens when a user launches the app directly from terminal (maybe to interact with CLI or enable logging). MacOS then seems to register the icon under the app Terminal, and from that time on the OS can't get rid of this idea anymore, even when the app was launched normally.

Thank you, this is a great find!

[tvollstaedt]

Wow, good find. It was the terminal app that had to be enabled, cmux in my case. I had an AI agent help me with my BetterDisplay setup and it launched the app from the CLI a number of times, so macOS registered the icon under cmux.

Worth noting for anyone else hitting this: the entry is located in MacOS System Settings → Menu Bar and is named after whatever terminal you used, so searching the list for "Terminal" can come up empty. In my case it was the only switch in the entire list that was off.

Thank you both!