How to Disable the Notification Center Notifications Panel on Your Mac or Macbook

How to Disable the Notification Panel in Mac OS Big Sur
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Apple is so very helpful, aren’t they? That’s one of the reasons that they shove the notification center, with the notifications panel screen, in your face whenever you accidentally move your trackpad or mouse too close to the upper righthand corner of your screen. Annoying, isn’t it? And kind of shocking that when you go to your notifications preferences there is no way to disable the Notification Center, or even to at least make it stop flying out that notifications panel. Well, we’ve got you covered; here’s how to disable the Mac Notification Center.

Apple claims that the Notification Center minimizes interruptions, but we have found the opposite to be true. For us, there is little more annoying than when we are working on something, and we get our cursor too close to the danger zone of the upper right-hand corner, and suddenly a large swath of our screen on the right-hand side is covered with a panel of notifications that we didn’t ask for (because the notification center is populated by default when you first get your Mac or when you update to a new OS).

Now, we did this using a 2020 M1 Macbook Air running Big Sur, and as with all things Apple, YMWV (see what we did there? Usually it’s “YMMV” for Your Milage May Vary, but we say “YMWV” for Your Milage WILL Vary, because… Apple).

Finally, we need to explain: these instructions will mostly disable the notification center, in much the same way that Wesley was “mostly dead”. If you get too close to that corner you will still see a tiny button fly out that says “Edit Widgets” (we’ll explain that below), but it is much less intrusive than the notification center panel, and barely obstructive.

How to Disable the Notification Center Notifications Panel on Your Mac or Macbook

What you need to know is that this is a two-step process, and that each step may contain several substeps (basically the same number as the number of apps and widgets that are currently residing in your notification center).

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The first thing to do is to get rid of all of the notifications that are notifying you of events in your various apps, such as mail, messages, etc..

How to Disable the Notification Panel in Mac OS Apps Widgets

To disable app notifications in the notifications center, go to System Preferences, to the Notifications section.

how to disable turn off mac notificatioin center panel

Uncheck “Show in Notification Center” on every single app.

To be super safe, also turn off all alerts (if you’re cool with that) by making ‘Alert style’ be “None”.

Once you have done that, it’s back to the Notification Center panel you go (for the last time, unless and until you decide to turn it on)! What you will have left are widgets. To get rid of the widgets you need to control-click on each widget (in other words, hold down the ‘control’ key, which is to the right of the ‘option’ key at the lower left corner of your keyboard, and then click on your trackpad or with your mouse). That will pop up a drop down (see what we did there?) menu like this:

how to remove widgets from notification center on mac

Click on “Remove Widget”. Do this for each widget, and then you will have nothing in your Notification Center. Well, that’s not entirely accurate: you will still have the “Edit Widgets” button, which will still fly out when you get too close to the danger zone, but as we said at the outset, it is much less intrusive and barely obscures anything. We hope this was helpful!

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3 thoughts on “How to Disable the Notification Center Notifications Panel on Your Mac or Macbook

  1. Frederick, can you give a little more detail? Are those terminal commands? Or something else?

  2. I was having the same problem of the Notification Center. I found a different solution to the problem. In the System Preferences > Trackpad section. select more gestures tab and disable the notification center option. Suddenly I could keep Notification Center, and two finger swipe right up to the edge of the screen. It makes working on Final Cut Pro so much easier.

  3. Change unload to
    launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist; killall NotificationCenter or killall SystemUIServer.

    Change unload to load to reverse.

    Learn something, little children.

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