What are Menus

In computing, a menu is a series of options users may choose to use to perform a certain task. The menus are contained in a menu bar, this is because the menu bar itself is not a window, but it is a toolbar, but a container object for other menus.

Menu Structure

The menus are organized following the principle of the trees, this means that a menu can have children menus and parents menus. Initially, to create a menu bar, the new object identifier is a valid menu handle, in addition to the menu bar it remains as the root, node, or in other words, a menu without parents.

From there you can start creating menus that can be children called File, Edit, and another other is View, which will have as a parent a root menu.

These menus can have kids menus, so file, descending MenuBar can breed Open, Save, Save As, Consolidation, etc, and following these same rules, Code File offspring can beget a submenu with commands in ASCII, Unicode, UTF-8, among others. The organization belongs to the sanction of an abstraction layer that is treated in the process of programming through the Operating System APIs.

Types of menus

The most common types of menus are:
Normal – Those with the highest prevalence in applications.
Checkboxes – Clicking on them activates an indicator (usually a pigeon) and its status changes to ‘checking/unchecking’ (checked/unchecked).

Radio buttons – Radiobuttons, are groups of buttons where only one can be active all of them and their indicator will usually be a bullet.
Submenus – Menus are menus that have children, i.e. can not be clicked, instead you must select one of their ’sons’, and usually bring an arrow on the right side indicating the nature of it.
Separators – Menus have no name or value but a handler. They are displayed as opaque gray lines between the list of commands.

Features of menus

Although menus are customizable, there are features that can be appreciated if you see a menu:

Icon – On the left side there is a space to store an indicator of either type of menu (bullet and dove for the radio button for the check box) or a small graphic that has been implemented.

Mnemonic – An underlined letter indicates which point you can press Alt ability after
Hotkeys. As its name implies, it is a key combination that activates the menu once it has been pressed. They tend to appear on the right end of each command from the list.