Here are the quick instructions, more detail below:
Try this first. If that kills your menubar but the menubar doesn’t reappear, try this.
I use a Macbook Pro laptop for work. OS X has a program called Spotlight that lets you search your machine by a keyboard shortcut, like Quicksilver or Alfred. On occasion, this feature stops working.
The normal solutions are:
- open Activity Monitor, search for SystemUIServer, force quit the application
- open a terminal and issue: killall -KILL SystemUIServer
Normally, that will cause the program to stop – but also to restart, I’m assuming via launchctl or something similar. You’ll see the standard menubar display (date/time/power/sound/volume/etc.) disappear for an instant and immediately return.
When I tried it today, my menubar disappeared. No such restart happened. It took ages to find the fix, and when I did it was buried in a CNET article. so I’m posting here for others.
If the menu bar doesn’t reappear, do this:
- Copy this: /System/Library/CoreServices/
- Open a finder window
- Press shift+cmd+g
- Paste the above
- Open the app SystemUIServer.app
- Profit
I hope this helps. I might do a video covering this bullshit. I have yet to pin down the cause but I’m assuming it might have been caused by my system stopping after the battery died, or due to other menu bar items mucking up the environment. Not worth trying to fix now as it rarely happens, but if it does happen again I’ll go through the logs and try to solve it.