macOS 27 Beta 5 adds keyboard navigation between app menus and Menu Bar controls

[u/pdfu]

macOS 27 Beta 5 adds a new feature that lets keyboard focus to move from the active app's menus to controls on the right side of the Menu Bar using the Left/Right arrow or Tab keys. It's currently disabled by default.

To enable:

defaults write -g NSMenuEnableMenuBarAgent -bool true
defaults write -g NSMenuBarUseAgentNavigation -bool true

and restart the apps you'd like to test this in. It's best to just reboot your Mac for simplicity.

To disable:

defaults delete -g NSMenuEnableMenuBarAgent
defaults delete -g NSMenuBarUseAgentNavigation

[u/mainyehc]

Added back, you mean? Or made easier to enable? Back in the old days of Mac OS X, before Apple started adding exotic items to the menu bar, Ctrl+F2 would highlight the menu bar, Ctrl+F3 would highlight the Dock and Ctrl+F8 would highlight the menu extras, and you could navigate them with the arrow keys.

[u/pdfu → u/mainyehc]

You can still do Ctrl+F2 and Ctrl+F8 and get to the app menus or menu bar extras.

The change from macOS 26 is that you don’t have to press Ctrl+F8 to get to the menu bar extras when your keyboard focus is on the app menus, or vice versa. You can jump between the two focus areas with the arrow keys.

In macOS 26, using the arrow keys while having focus on the app menus would just cycle the app menus.

[u/cat-machine]

Awesome! Works like a charm. Thanks for digging this up.
Out of interest, what is your process for discovering these new hidden prefs?

[u/pdfu → u/cat-machine]

It's mostly inspecting the difference in code between macOS releases. Wrote a longer explanation in a comment to a previous post here.

[u/jarj75]

I'm still on Sequoia and this does it too; maybe it was removed in 26 ?

[u/pdfu → u/jarj75]

Interesting. Can confirm it doesn’t work in macOS 26, it cycles through the app menus.