Fixing OS X Leopard’s translucent menu bar

For people using Leopard, one of the few things that make people unhappy seems to be the translucent menu bar. Here's how to revert it to the standard white menu bar without using third-party apps or hacks.

Several add-on products have been released to rectify this, but they all suffer from problems — some of them change the default background image to have a white stripe along the top, others don't work with multiple monitors, mess up the font rendering, etc.

Fortunately, Apple did make this a hidden preference in OS X Leopard.

To change the menu bar to be the old-style white, issue this command using the Terminal — paste in the whole thing, I split it into several lines for readability:

 sudo defaults write \
 /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer \
 'EnvironmentVariables' -dict 'CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE' 1

You will have to restart your computer for the change to take effect, but after that the menu bar will stay a solid white.

Enjoy your white, readable menu bar!

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If you should ever want the translucent version back, here's the command to revert the change to the default setting:

 sudo defaults delete \
 /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer \
 'EnvironmentVariables' -dict 'CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE'

Credit: UsingMac.com