Published: 2021-12-13 | Last edited: 2023-09-25

The auto-hiding menu bar in macOS fullscreen mode can be a pain in the rear end when you're using an app with its own menues/tabs/anything at the top of the screen:

fig. 1: The problem

Searching for a solution to this problem, the only one I found that did anything for me was to use the Python module autopy, specifically the autopy.mouse part. The way it can prevent the menu bar from unhiding is to literally move the cursor back down whenever it comes close to the trigger area.

fig. 2: The "solution"

This method is of course janky af, and not an ideal solution in any shape or form. That said, it does the job so I've made an attempt at daemonizing it.

A problem I had with autopy was that I couldn't get it to run in python3 on my M1 Mac, and while the python2.7 module worked fine I didn't like to depend on it. Soon enough though, I noticed that the python module was based on the excellent rust extension autopilot-rs by the same author, so I rewrote 'avoidmenu-worker.py' in rust, which removed any external dependencies.

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