title: Menu bars, pop-up menus and keyboard shortcuts
author: Armin Rigo

Menus are not yet another type of built-in objects. Instead, they are completely defined with classic Python objects, and QuArK
reads these objects’ attributes when it needs them to build the menu.

A menu bar or a pop-up menu is a list of one Python class instance for each item. The items need not really be class instances,
but QuArK expects them to have a few attributes, and instances of classes are, with modules, the only kind of object you can
give the attributes you want. qmenu.py defines two classes, one for normal menu items and one for menu items that open pop-up
menus. I recommend to always use instances of these classes to populate your menus. Please refer to qmenu.py for more
information about the expected attributes.

You set a Window’s menu bar by storing a list of instances of qmenu.popup into its menubar attribute. You can also assign
keyboard shortcuts to menu items; however, this is not done by setting an attribute (e.g. shortcut) to the instances of the
class qmenu.item. All shortcuts for a Window must be grouped in a dictionnary that must be assigned to the Window’s shortcuts
attribute. The dictionnary should contain pairs "shortcutkey":menuitem, where "shortcutkey" is a string describing the key
(e.g. "Ctrl+X") and menuitem is the item whose onclick attribute should be called. Although not required, I recommend that this
menuitem appear somewhere in the menu bar, too. If it is the case, QuArK adds the shortcut key string to the right of the item
in the menu. New in QuArK 5.5: a shortcut can be a number (a "virtual key code") as obtained in the configuration dialog box
(page Map, Keys). These shortcuts must be put in the attribute numshortcuts.
