QuoEdit Guide: Application 06

Customizing Menus

QuoEdit is released with capability of customizing menus so that you can add, remove or modify the some parts of menus or the menu items. You can do it with an included customizer “QuoEdit's Menu” or AppleScript.
See “QuoEdit's Menu Guide” for usage of the customizer. If you have read the tutorial, you may be able to launch the customizer from the menu of QuoEdit. This chapter describes overview of the customizing.

Basic terms
Menu
Menu item
What menu is customizable
Properties of additional menu items

Basic terms

There are two basic terms to customize menus, that is, “menu” and “menu item”.

Menu

QuoEdit supports the following kinds of menus.
   ◊ menu that is always shown on the menu bar
   ◊ submenu that is a menu in the parent menu
   ◊ popup menu that appears on some dialog box
   ◊ contextual menu that is available with Mac OS 8 and later

In QuoEdit, the menu on the menu bar is called “main menu” for convenience. (Really for convenience.)
As for the submenu, it is not actually included in the standard menus of QuoEdit but you can add it.

Menu item

Menu item is an item in the menu. In many cases (but not all cases), menu item is equivalent to menu command. For example, the Edit menu contains several menu items like “Copy”, “Cut” and so on. Note that a submenu is also a menu item in the parent menu. And a divider (separator line) that divides the menu items into groups is also a menu item.

What menu is customizable

Actually, there are still more two important words to categorize menus and menu items in QuoEdit, that is, “standard” and “additional”.
“Standard menu” or “standard menu item” means usual menu or menu item that is built in the application. And “additional menu” or “additional menu item” means menu or menu item that is added by the user (including me).

You can customize the following main menus.

1)	Extras menu Extras menu is one of the standard menus but exceptionally it can contain additional menu items bellow the standard menu items. Note that you can only modify the additional menu items.
2)	Tools menu Tools menu is also one of the standard menus but it originally contains no menu items.
3)	Your own additional menus You can add up to three main menus onto the menu bar. The additional main menus are positioned at left of the Window menu.

In QuoEdit, the each customizable menu (main menu or submenu) can have up to 31 menu items.

The definitions of menu items in the each main menu are saved in a definition file that is located in the Menus folder. When you added your own main menu, the definition file is created named with the menu’s name preceded by the menu ID number. As the ID number just affects the order of the additional menus on the menu bar when QuoEdit launches, you can modify or remove the number later.

Properties of additional menu items

Each menu item has its own properties. The most significant properties are probably ‘kind’, ‘name’ and ‘attachment’. This section mainly describes the ‘kind’ and ‘attachment’.

In QuoEdit, the additional menu items are categorized into the following six kinds, that is, four kinds of menu command types, submenu and divider. The type of the data that you can attach to the menu item depends on the kind.

	Kind		Attachment

	Run Script Runs the attached script		One of the following: alias of a script file or scripts folder relative path of a script file or scripts folder script data (sometimes called script object)

	Open by Finder Opens the attached object by the Finder		One of the following: alias of a file or a folder relative path of a file or a folder

	Type Text Makes text with the attached text data		Text data to be typed

	Tag Removes or adds specified prefix and suffix		A set of prefix and suffix to be added and prefix and suffix to be removed

	Submenu A submenu		None (Internally, a menu is attached.)

	Divider Divides menu items into groups		None

Other properties of additional menu items are:
   ◊ key assignment (shortcut key)
   ◊ condition for the usage (required window type and so on)
   ◊ whether or not to be used by the contextual menu
   ◊ optional information
   ◊ optional behavior
Those properties also depend on the kind of the menu item.

As for the key assignment, avoid using keys already assigned for other menu item. See also “Menu Commands” in this Guide for implicitly assigned keys. In principle, shortcut keys with the Control key are reserved (free to use) for usage of the additional menu items in QuoEdit.

See also “Properties dialog boxes” in “QuoEdit's Menu Guide” for the detail of the properties. If you are familiar with AppleScript, see also “Menu item class” in the Scripting Guide. But studying the dialog box of the customizer would be actually easier, rather than reading the descriptions, to understand the properties.

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