How to show the macOS menu bar on fullscreen mode

When you maximise apps to fullscreen on Mac OS Sierra, the menu bar is hidden. This is expected, because it's full screen, but if you're using an app with tabs (like Visual Studio Code), the menu bar often drops down when you're trying to switch tabs. This can be infuriating.

Google Chrome doesn't have this issue because the developers have cleverly coded the app to move the tab bar down when the menu bar appears. Unfortunately this option isn't available in Firefox or Visual Studio Code.

I've been trying to find a way to permanently show the menu bar when apps are fullscreened as a workaround.

Solution 1:

I don't know if this is considered full screen but if I click on green button in top left corner of app while holding down option key, the app screen will maximize but leave apple menu visible.

Solution 2:

Here's how I did it.

I installed an app called Magnet which is a neat Window manager for MacOS. It brings Windows' neat Window snapping feature to MacOS and lets you designate how much of the screen a window should take up. One of the modes it has, "Maximise", actually resizes a Window to fill the screen without fullscreening it.

As you can see the results are pretty good. The one down side of this approach is that using Magnet to "Maximise" a window doesn't create a new desktop Space like MacOS fullscreen mode does, but you can manually create a Space using the mission control spaces bar and maximise the app there with Magnet. You can then use Mission control to move this Space around with Mission Control as normal, but it will have a generic name like 'Desktop 2' etc