Hide macOS Tahoe’s Menu Icons With This One Simple Trick

I really dislike Apple’s choice to clutter macOS Tahoe’s menus with icons. It makes menus hard to scan, and a bunch of the icons Apple has chosen make no sense and are inconsistent between system applications.

Steve Troughton-Smith is my hero for finding a Terminal command to disable them:

Here’s one for the icons-in-menus haters on macOS Tahoe:

defaults write -g NSMenuEnableActionImages -bool NO

It even preserves the couple of instances you do want icons, like for window zoom/resize.

Your apps will respect this change after relaunching. I ran this a few minutes ago and already appreciate the change. I really think Apple should roll this change back in macOS 27, or offer a proper setting to disable these icons for those of us who find them distracting.