I’m working on the macOS 26 update for NetNewsWire, and I wondered how difficult it would be to get rid of all the menu item icons.
Turns out to be quite easy! Just a few lines of code and they’re all gone.
https://gist.github.com/brentsimmons/8dbe00e8acbeede26baaaebd06a867fc
@brentsimmons Thanks for this! I've made a refinement of the menu icon removal code that properly handles menus in palette presentation — for example, the zoom palette of an NSWindow.
https://gist.github.com/jonsterling/500feb6df06d854a9b1edfa30fcb31a9
@brentsimmons You are doing the lord’s work, Brent.
@brentsimmons not surprised if they add an Info key to do so, that will only increase the ui mixup among apps
@brentsimmons Drat. I was hoping for a "defaults write" command. 😉
@brentsimmons Nice! Do selected item ✔️ still appear?
Edit: yes, just tested this and they in fact do!
@brentsimmons This makes for a great appearance settings toggle! 🥳
@pasi @brentsimmons does this remove icons from menu items that i actually do want to add icons to?
@Joekw @brentsimmons Aren’t we *removing* icons here? Not adding them 😛
Jokes aside, I think you’d need to go another route. It wouldn’t be too difficult rebuilding all the default menu items from scratch without icons and then only use them where you want/need to.
I’m already doing that for half of my menu items anyway.
@pasi @brentsimmons we currently set some thumbnails to the menu items for the users custom backgrounds, so would be sad to lose that. perhaps there's some way to identify those items in the swizzle..
@Joekw @brentsimmons Opus 4.5 wrote me this code that allows retaining the image on specific menu items. Seems to work well!
https://gist.github.com/PasiSalenius/a4a0322797427b7a09da0033427d5c54
