Mac Catalyst: Toolbar still appears below title bar, leaving empty safe area

UI Frameworks SwiftUI
KrtNthnyLn OP
Created 3w
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Hi everyone, I’m testing my Catalyst SwiftUI project on iOS 26 / iPadOS 26 / macOS 26. I started with a NavigationSplitView (triple-column) inside a WindowGroup. On iPad it looks great: the toolbar items merge into the navigation bar, with the three traffic lights. But on Mac Catalyst, the app always reserves a blank safe area below the traffic lights, and places the toolbar on a separate line beneath the title bar. That leaves wasted vertical space I don’t want.

What I expect (based on Apple’s WWDC session “Elevate the design of your iPad app”): The toolbar should merge into the title bar with the traffic lights, no separate row. Content should extend into the full height of the window. What I get on Mac Catalyst: Title bar + traffic lights at the top. Then a completely separate toolbar row below it. Safe area inset prevents my content from reaching the top of the window.

What I’ve tried: .toolbarRole(.automatic), .editor, .browser → no effect. Hiding the title bar via titlebar?.titleVisibility = .hidden → removes the text but not the toolbar gap. Clearing titlebar?.toolbar → no difference. So far, I can’t find any way to get Catalyst to integrate toolbars into the window chrome the way native SwiftUI on macOS does.

Is this a known limitation of Mac Catalyst, or is there a supported way to achieve the same “inline toolbar with window controls” layout? Switching to a Mac app vs. Catalyst fixes the issue, but I would have a lot more work to do to get the app ready for release, not ideal since it works near perfect on iPad.

Thanks!

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-Kirito OP
2d

I’ve been working on this for the past two days, but in a UIKit Mac Catalyst context. I managed to get it working, though I believe this might actually be a bug in Mac Catalyst. I was about to file a report when I came across your post. Did you already submit one?

The workaround I found is to assign an instance of NSToolbar to the windowScene's titlebar like this:

// Inside SceneDelegate.swift
#if targetEnvironment(macCatalyst)
let toolbar = NSToolbar()
toolbar.displayMode = .iconOnly // reduces toolbar height
self.window?.windowScene?.titlebar?.toolbar = toolbar
#endif

This setup gives you the unified sidebar and toolbar, but there’s still quite a bit of empty space at the top, even with displayMode set to .iconOnly. Since I didn’t actually need a toolbar in my case, I fixed it by applying a negative top safe area inset. That gave me the look I wanted:

let splitViewController = UISplitViewController(style: .doubleColumn)
let sidebarNavigationController = KNavigationController(rootViewController: SidebarViewController())

#if targetEnvironment(macCatalyst)
sidebarNavigationController.additionalSafeAreaInsets.top = -28 // roughly the titlebar height
splitViewController.additionalSafeAreaInsets.top = -28
#endif

splitViewController.setViewController(sidebarNavigationController, for: .primary)

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