### 3.10 tk-menu-bar ¶

tk-menu-bar, tk_bindForTraversal \- Support for menu bars

#### Synopsis ¶

tk-menu-bar frame ?menu menu ...?

tk_bindForTraversal arg arg ...

#### Description ¶

These two commands are Tcl procedures in the Tk script library. They provide support for menu bars. A menu bar is a frame that contains a collection of menu buttons that work together, so that the user can scan from one menu to another with the mouse: if the mouse button is pressed over one menubutton (causing it to post its menu) and the mouse is moved over another menubutton in the same menu bar without releasing the mouse button, then the menu of the first menubutton is unposted and the menu of the new menubutton is posted instead. Menus in a menu bar can also be accessed using keyboard traversal (i.e. by typing keystrokes instead of using the mouse). In order for an application to use these procedures, it must do three things, which are described in the paragraphs below.

First, each application must call tk-menu-bar to provide information about the menubar. The frame argument gives the path name of the frame that contains all of the menu buttons, and the menu arguments give path names for all of the menu buttons associated with the menu bar. Normally frame is the parent of each of the menu’s. This need not be the case, but frame must be an ancestor of each of the menu’s in order for grabs to work correctly when the mouse is used to pull down menus. The order of the menu arguments determines the traversal order for the menu buttons. If tk-menu-bar is called without any menu arguments, it returns a list containing the current menu buttons for frame, or an empty string if frame isn’t currently set up as a menu bar. If tk-menu-bar is called with a single menu argument consisting of an empty string, any menubar information for frame is removed; from now on the menu buttons will function independently without keyboard traversal. Only one menu bar may be defined at a time within each top-level window.

The second thing an application must do is to identify the traversal characters for menu buttons and menu entries. This is done by underlining those characters using the :underline options for the widgets. The menu traversal system uses this information to traverse the menus under keyboard control (see below).

The third thing that an application must do is to make sure that the input focus is always in a window that has been configured to support menu traversal. If the input focus is none then input characters will be discarded and no menu traversal will be possible. If you have no other place to set the focus, set it to the menubar widget: tk-menu-bar creates bindings for its frame argument to support menu traversal.

The Tk startup scripts configure all the Tk widget classes with bindings to support menu traversal, so menu traversal will be possible regardless of which widget has the focus. If your application defines new classes of widgets that support the input focus, then you should call tk_bindForTraversal for each of these classes. Tk_bindForTraversal takes any number of arguments, each of which is a widget path name or widget class name. It sets up bindings for all the named widgets and classes so that the menu traversal system will be invoked when appropriate keystrokes are typed in those widgets or classes.

#### Keywords ¶

keyboard traversal, menu, menu bar, post