Pointless Trick: Customizable Main Menu Toolbar

[TheQwerty]

Some other threads got me thinking...If one doesn't use the toolbar and its plentiful buttons for their intended purposes, is there something more useful they could do with it?

Well not really... but they could turn it into a fully customizable quasi-replacement of the main application menu:

screenshot.5.png

How did I pull this off?

1. I created Run Script UDCs for each main menu category so that I could retain the Alt shortcut keys. Each command calls a script consisting of just the PopupMainMenu SC with the appropriate category:
   screenshot.6.png
2. Then I cleaned off my toolbar and added user buttons for each category.
3. Each user button was defined to call the related Run Script UDC and given a label as its icon.
   screenshot.7.png
4. Lastly I hid true main menu by using command:
   #1061 Miscellaneous | General Functions | Show/Hide Main Menu (Alt+Up)

The end result is I have something that resembles the main menu but is actually the toolbar and can be customized entirely to my liking - I could reorganize the commands, add or remove commands, create new items, assign them icons if I want, even make it look like I'm using a window layout that isn't actually available:

screenshot.8.png

But how does it compare to the real thing? There's a few shortcomings:

1. The menus won't appear until the mouse click is released (on mouse up). You can enable Fire click on mousedown in each user button but then overlay arrows are shown breaking the illusion.
2. While you can use the normal shortcut keys to display the menu (or customize them) doing so causes the menu to show at the mouse cursor instead of under the "toolbar" which is a bit disorienting.
3. Further you lose the ability to easily navigate between each of the menu categories via the keyboard.
4. As you can see the labels need to be renamed and rather short to avoid being cut off.

Now, I don't feel this is worth doing and certainly won't be continuing to use it, but I thought I'd share it in the off chance someone here might be crazy enough to find it useful.

[serendipity]

Cool hack!

[admin]

Damn, now I feel hacked.

[klownboy]

TheQwerty, very nice idea. As you said, it would take some work initially to set it up, but once you've done it, you could use Stefan's ToolbarManager http://www.xyplorer.com/xyfc/viewtopic. ... barmanager to switch between your normal toolbar and this one. Of course you'd want to remove the main menu in a script when you switched.