Native Menu Bar

Native Menu Bar is a C API for adding menus to your application using native UI on Windows and Mac, and using GTK2 or GTK3 backends on supported platforms e.g. Linux.

Library setup is slightly different depending on the backend implementation and will probably require some #ifdefs in your code. See the examples for more info.

User interaction is forwarded to your application as events which can be responded to using the same code on all platforms.

Features:

• Menu bar with menus and submenus
• Regular menu items
• Checkmark menu items
• Enable and disable (grey out) menu items
• Create default platform menus (App and Window menus on MacOS)
• Keyboard mnemonics on supported platforms (Win32 and GTK)
• Only 2 files for easy integration, .h and .c
• Compiles cleanly on MSVC and clang

Notes

The API provides different functions for checkable menu items nmb_insertCheckMenuItem and regular menu items nmb_insertMenuItem. This distinction is required by GTK backends which may render the two differently, but is not technically required on Win32 or Cocoa. If you don't care about GTK you can use regular menu items everywhere and set/check their checked state with nmb_setMenuItemChecked and nmb_isMenuItemChecked.

Keyboard mnemonics allow users to jump to specific menu items by pressing a corresponding key on their keyboard. To use mnemonics place an underscore _ character before the letter in the caption you would like to become the mnemonic. Mnemonics are available on Win32 and GTK backends. Mnemonics are ignored on Cocoa which does not require them since users can start typing any caption name to jump to it automatically.

Currently the library supports both GTK2 and GTK3. At the time of writing GTK2 and 3 on MacOS have strange behaviour around window resizing and respond to mouse input inconsistently. The GTK2 backend also issues deprecation warnings when compiling.

Please note that this library is not thread safe on any platform. You should not attempt to call any API functions from different threads at the same time.

Building

In general you can use this library by simply adding native_menu_bar.h and native_menu_bar.c to your project.

On mac native_menu_bar.c should be compiled as Objective-C. You can do this by either changing the extension from .c to .m, or explicitly set it to compile as Objective-C within XCode.

Additionally on mac, Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) should be disabled for native_menu_bar.c. If you have ARC enabled for you project you can disable it for individual files by adding the flag -fno-objc-arc in project name > Targets > project name > Build Phases > Compile Sources.

To see how the examples are compiled with premake, read the premake file.

Building Examples

On Mac:

brew install sdl2 gtk+ gtk+3
cd examples
./premake xcode4
open ./build/xcode4/examples.xcworkspace

Then select and run the example projects from within Xcode.

On Windows:

Run the following commands in Git Bash (or some other bash for windows prompt).

cd examples
./premake vs2022
start ./build/vs2022/examples.sln

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. See TODO for things to work on and notes about current progress.