How To Add A Clock To The Touch Bar On A MacBook Pro
The Touch Bar on a MacBook Pro has not been the mind blowing feature that would push users to upgrade their MacBooks. It’s still around and for those that did buy the MacBook Pro, they get some use out of it. There’s no option to turn it off so there’s not much that can be done about it. Users can not use, or use it for something that’s not integral to their workflow. Clock Bar is a free, open-source app that can put a clock to the Touch Bar. It adds it to the end of the control strip. If you don’t use the Touch Bar but would like it to show you something that’s just a bit useful, time is as useful as it gets.
Clock On Touch Bar
Download Clock Bar, and run it. It adds an icon to the Menu bar that’s basically just a clock icon that won’t show you the current time, not that you need it. The icon shows that the app is running and nothing else.
In order to see the clock on the Touch Bar, you must have it set to show both app controls and the control strip. If you limit the Touch Bar to showing you only app controls, the clock will not appear.
You can change what the Touch Bar shows from your Mac preferences. Open the System Preferences app, and go to Keyboard. You will see a dropdown called ‘Touch Bar shows’, where you can select App controls and Control Strip.
If you don’t want Clock Bar to show an icon in the menu bar, you can disable it from its preferences. Speaking of which, the app lets you customize the color of the clock. The clock will always be a digital clock. There’s no option for an analogous one but the few supported colors are nice to look at. You can also change the time format to 12 or 24 hours.
If you choose to hide Clock Bar’s menu bar icon, you can access the app’s preferences by long pressing on the clock on the Touch bar.
It’s debatable how useful this is. Users might think it’s not intuitive to look down at your keyboard to check the time but at the same time, the app adds reasonable usefulness to the Touch Bar. All we can say is; to each their own. If you need a clock on the Touch Bar, you can get it with this free app.
How do i run it?
If you have brew -> brew cask install clock-bar