How to NOT autohide the menubar on Leopard

WARNING – following any instructions here will have a severe impact on your system and may possibly cause a host of unknown problems. If you follow any instructions in this post and you have any problems PLEASE do NOT expect me to help you out, you are on your own. Following my instructions below are just plain stupid, do not do it!

So, you want the Mac OS X menu bar to automatically hide itself? So did I. One would think that this was a typical thing that you could enable by right-clicking the menu bar and then click the  “Autohide” option? Think again – this is Apple, and their Human Interface Guidelines probably says any such action is WRONG – as is a lot of other features I desire. Then, how to do it? A friend of mine suggested Menufela. This does not currently work with Leopard, AND it costs money. So I googled around a bit, and found out that one is able to disable the menu bar per application by tweaking the applications Info.plist.

Having to tweak every application on the system just to make the menu bar hide itself is really, really stupid. But whatever, I like to muck about with my system (which most probably is why it is soon ready for a reinstall) , so I thought I’d give it a shot. I edited the Info.plist of iTerm, and behold, the menu bar was gone. I moved the mouse to the upper edge of the screen – and voilá, there it was again! Fantastic, just what I wanted. Now what? Make a script that does this to all the applications in /Applications, of course!

Brilliant idea. This is very easy to do with a little mix of the cli programs find and defaults. So I started up iTerm – with no menu bar – and typed this command that will edit every Info.plist for all applications in /Applications:

find /Applications -type d -name “*.app” -exec defaults write “{}/Contents/Info” LSUIPresentationMode -int 4 \;

Away it went – it gave a lot of errors and took quite a while to complete, but when it was done all applications except Finder had no menu bar! I was happy as a kid eating his first ice cream cone.

Until I restarted Safari and went to a web page that required login. My password was gone! Suddenly being a little bit nervous I started up Keychain Access, only to discover that I was getting a “Access to this item is restricted” every time I tried revealing a password. Time to panic. I tried all the tricks I could find via google, including verifying and repairing my keychain from within Keychain Access. Nothing worked. Then I suddenly happened to find a thread on macnn.com describing how to re-sign modified applications….  I suddenly relized I had been an idiot, and started reading..

True enough, codesign -v  reported “code or signature modified.” – modifying the Info.plist file will break the programs signature, hence disallowing access to your keychain items! I then followed the howto and generated a new certificate for code signing, and re-signed Keychain Access. After resigning I had access to my passwords again!  So I tried the same for Safari, and lo – passwords started showing up for websites again. Really fantastic. So in order to “repair” all the broken applications in /Applications I did this:

find /Applications -type d -name “*.app” -exec codesign -f -s privateCertificate “{}” \;

Now all the applications using Keychains were able to get access to their password, albeit I have to press the “Always allow” button all the time, at least I do not have to start remembering passwords all over again All in all a fun little poke into the shadows behind the Apple.

And just to repeat myself: Don’t do this, it may have all kinds of weird side effects. Play with fire and you will get burned.