From some unknown reason, the bluetooth icon keeps disappearing from the menu bar at random. I have to open up settings and activate "Show bluetooth in Menu Bar" regularly. Why does this happen and how can I stop it from disappearing?
MacOS – Bluetooth icon keeps randomly disappearing from menu bar in High Sierra
bluetoothhigh sierramacosmenu bar
Related Solutions
Although I do not know the problem, there are several solutions.
- Reboot or Log out.
- Kill the SystemUIServer process, either via Activity Monitor or via
killall SystemUIServer. The UI server will restart and the problem will be gone. I've seen it happen that I needed to kill it twice to fully take effect.
I ran into this shortcut by accident; my own question was the related one to yours: where is this configured, and how can I disable it?
Here is the answer to that:
In system preferences -> keyboard -> "shortcuts" tab -> "keyboard" list entry -> last item in the list is "Move focus to status menus."
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Best Answer
Using inductive logic, and under the assumption that you didn't "un-tick" the box, then it must be software. My best guess would be software associated with a device that uses Bluetooth. One way to check that is:
Hold down shiftoption while clicking the BT icon in your menu bar. You should see all the usual options, plus one called
Debug. From here, things get version dependent, but you should at least have aDebugoption giving you more options to reset the Mac's BT module, or any connected Apple BT devices. Some earlier versions of mac os, prior to 10.13.6, are reported to also have a "BT log" option.And so this might be the first stop, reset devices one at a time in a process-of-elimination mode.
If you're more conversant with BT, Apple has some tools that might help pinpoint an errant device causing the "un-tick". One of these tools is referenced frequently, and called
Bluetooth Explorer.app(download). It's part of Apple's developer's toolkit. Another tool available in the same download isPacketLogger.app.Bluetooth Explorer.appwould start on my system (10.13.6), but refused to display the GUI, making it useless. But apparently it does run on some systems, so YMMV. However thePacketLogger.appstarted without drama. It has features that may help find a particular message or message type - if you know what to look for :)Yeah, I agree, fairly remote possibility that a BT device is the cause, and that these apps will pinpoint it, but if all else fails...