Use the screen area around the notch?

[tigger04]

Is there some way of being able to use the screen area to the left and right of the notch, other than with the oversized menu bar that Apple gives us? I normally hide my menu bar to maximize screen real estate, and on recently buying the newer M3 MB Air, with the notch for the first time, I have to say I find this software limitation from Apple quite infuriating!

I noticed in one of the other discussions, @schlomo appears to have managed it somehow, although it was not what he wanted in that case:

But when I toggle the notch in BD's menu, all I get is the screen is letterboxed to "hide" the notch (and losing all that screen real estate, not just adjacent to the notch, but on the bottom of the screen also somehow).

I tried adding custom resolutions, but all that does is move the screen image below the notch again.

Am I doing something wrong in my config to get this behaviour, is there something I can try, is there something BD can do to help for this use case at all?

thanks!

[waydabber]

You can't completely eliminate the notch using standard methods (there are some low level system hacks, requiring disabling SIP etc that can achieve this - check out this great article by @alin23, creator of the great app https://lunar.fyi - https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/Fullscreen-apps-above-the-MacBook-notch). You can create a virtual screen and stream its contents to the main screen - since the virtual screen does not have a notch, the result will be a screen that simply goes "under" (in Z space) the notch. But these are workarounds.

[tigger04]

Yeah I found that article before. Have you tried that Frida script? did you ever get it to work? closest I ever got was:

~/code/macos/frida-scripts$
> sudo frida -q -l ./overNotch.js -e "toggleFullScreen()" Safari
Failed to attach: unable to access process with pid 4168 from the current user account

Lunar is a nice app, doesn't solve this particular problem. I prefer BetterDisplay anyway 🙃

I'll try the virtual screen streaming, might be a good hack!

Much as I love the hardware, Apple can be so bloody patronizing with these artificial software constraints!

[alin23]

Note that for Frida to be allowed to inject system processes you need:

• SIP disabled (csrutil disable in Recovery Mode)
• the required nvram boot args (sudo nvram boot-args=-arm64e_preview_abi then reboot)
• latest main Frida version which works around a recent macOS restriction (pip install git+https://github.com/frida/frida-python.git@main)

... which I don't recommend doing just for getting that space around the notch. I only wrote that article as an exploration of how this can be done, not as a tutorial.

To be honest I never use that, after a few days of not seeing the middle tabs of my browser and text editor, not being able to click on the window title and going through crashes in Electron apps, I got back to using the screen normally with the notch space only showing the menu bar.

[tigger04]

Thanks for taking the time to explain! I think I have SIP disabled already for something else ... I'd like to think I could deal with the dead zone but the instability / thought of it bricking out on me gives me pause. I will take your advice and put up with the fat menu bar. Maybe I'll get creative with some menu bar status scripting or some such ... i am slightly obsessive about getting max use out of screen real estate lol.

thanks both for the great work!