How to add an Eject Button to your menubar
May 20, 2008
A great hidden feature built into Mac OS X is one which will add an an eject button to the menubar. This little tip will come in especially handy if you have a desktop Mac Pro under your desk which can make it hard to reach down and eject the drive to place a disk into your computer.
To add an eject button to your menubar:
1. Go to the Menu Extras folder, which is located in
System–>Library–>CoreServices.
2. Once you find the Menu Extras folder, look for a file called Eject.menu.
3. Double click on it, and the eject menu button will immediately show up in the menubar.
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18 Responses to “How to add an Eject Button to your menubar”
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Careful about adding an eject button to your menubar in this manner. I did this to one system and had major problems afterwards. To the point that I had to reinstall.
Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
Thanks for that, was wondering how it was done.
And in response to comment #1: haven’t had any problems. Can’t see why adding the menu bar like this would cause a problem either. If the system wants to add a menu item, or you click “show xxx in menu bar”, the system opens the xxx.menu file in the Menu Items folder itself.
How do you remove it?
As Jethryn indicated, there is *no* danger to adding this menu extra to your menubar. Note that Apple explicitly advertises this approach for several different models, and several different OS versions – see:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304526
and
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75466
Hold Down your Apple/CMD key, click and drag menu item off the menu bar!
Thanks! Why does it have to be so simple?
To Josh: To remove this or any other menu extra, just Cmd-drag the specific icon off the menu bar. You’ll see it disappear in a “puff” (with accompanying sound effect).
Some items can be added to the menu via preferences (e.g. the “Show xxx in menu bar” selections in the Displays, Sound, Network, etc. preference panes), while others may need to be accessed directly via items within the “/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/” area.
You can also rearrange the order of the menu by holding the apple button.
How does this make it easier for those with a desktop Mac Pro under their desk? You can’t eject the drive from the Mac anyway. It’s either this or the keyboard. It’s a handy tip, but it doesn’t really gain you anything.
To AC: It is very useful if you have two optical drives in your desktop tower, as you are given the choice of which disc to eject. It even includes my external firewire lightscribe drive in the list of drives to choose from. If you use the eject button on the keyboard, it only opens the first optical drive.
The eject button was in the menu by default on my PowerMac G4 in earlier versions of OS X, but seems to have decided it wasn’t required on my MacPro.(How wrong they were).
[...] Command key. You can also re-arrange menu bar items by dragging with the Command key depressed.[Via MacSupport]Read | Permalink | Email [...]
[...] Command key. You can also re-arrange menu bar items by dragging with the Command key depressed.[Via MacSupport]Read | Permalink | Email [...]
Does anybody know how to get rid of the menu extra for syncing .mac for good. Whenever I restart it reappears.
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