How to Make the Menubar in Leopard Opaque

One of the “features” in Leopard which I really disliked was the transparent menubar. The top 20 or so pixels of my screen are such a small area of my screen that I could care less that I would want to see more of my wallpaper behind a piece of an operating system’s interface which is so central and important. Apple should have made the transparency of the menubar an option in Leopard instead of making it mandatory.

A few days after installing Leopard, I looked into ways to make the menubar solid again. I found one program, but I did not like the method in which it made the menubar solid. OpaqueMenuBar basically took your current wallpaper, painted a white stripe on the top and replaced it for your desktop background. Not a bad idea, but it required refreshing which became annoying, and would mess up the aspect ratio of the wallpaper because it turns out it didn’t overlay the white stripe, but made your wallpaper shorter and added the white bar at the top. I didn’t really like the method OpaqueMenuBar took, so I just lived with the transparent menubar for a while.

Then came along an actual fix by Steve Miner. This fix isn’t for the lighthearted though as it directly modifies a system file. To make your menubar opaque, all you need to do is run the following command in terminal:

[Warning: Not entering the entire command can be dangerous. We are editing a sensitive system file which can possibly cause your mac not to boot up afterwards if you screw this up.]

It will ask you for your administrator password since you are editing a system file. If you choose to play along and enter your password, restart, and you should see your menubar with a solid background.

Unfortunately, what this fix does though is make the menubar background a solid white. Apparently the subtle gradient is gone, but Many Tricks has created an app that adds a gradient to the menubar and even allows you to control the colors of the gradients. Add this app to your login items and you’ll never have to worry about this again.

Update: I’ve found out that the ‘1′ at the end of that command above controls the color of the menubar. Entering the following will make the menubar a nice grey which is pretty close to the average shade of the menubar from Tiger

And a preview of the result:

You can also try entering other values between 0 and 1 to see the different results. However do be careful that you don’t omit with any other part of the command. I’ve learnt that this is a very sensitive file in that if you delete it, your mac will not boot up anymore! The plus about going this route is that you no longer need the app which overlays the gradient over your menubar.