Peter Steinberger 6/17/2025

Showing Settings from macOS Menu Bar Items: A 5-Hour Journey

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This technical article details the author's frustrating journey to make a SettingsLink work reliably within a macOS MenuBarExtra. It explains why the standard SwiftUI approach fails for menu bar apps due to their unique activation policy and background utility status. The post explores deprecated private API workarounds, the newer `openSettings` environment action, and the complex, hacky solutions (like using a hidden window or temporarily showing the Dock icon) required to get settings windows to open and focus correctly across different macOS versions.

Showing Settings from macOS Menu Bar Items: A 5-Hour Journey

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