1.5 The SXEmacs Menubar

The SXEmacs menubar is intended to be conformant to the usual conventions for menubars, although conformance is not yet perfect. The menu at the extreme right is the ‘Help’ menu, which should always be available. It provides access to all the SXEmacs help facilities available through C-h, as well as samples of various configuration files like ‘~/.Xdefaults’ and ‘~/.emacs’. At the extreme left is the ‘Files’ menu, which provides the usual file reading, writing, and printing operations, as well as operations like revert buffer from most recent save. The next menu from the left is the ‘Edit’ menu, which provides the ‘Undo’ operation as well as cutting and pasting, searching, and keyboard macro definition and execution.

SXEmacs provides a very dynamic environment, and the Lisp language makes for highly flexible applications. The menubar reflects this: many menus (eg, the ‘Buffers’ menu, see Buffers Menu) contain items determined by the current state of SXEmacs, and most major modes and many minor modes add items to menus and even whole menus to the menubar. In fact, some applications like w3.el and VM provide so many menus that they define a whole new menubar and add a button that allows convenient switching between the “SXEmacs menubar” and the “application menubar”. Such applications normally bind themselves to a particular frame, and this switching only takes place on frames where such an application is active (ie, the current window of the frame is displaying a buffer in the appropriate major mode).

Other menus which are typically available are the ‘Options’, ‘Tools’, ‘Buffers’, ‘Apps’, and ‘Mule’ menus. For detailed descriptions of these menus, Pull-down Menus. (In 21.2 SXEmacsen, the ‘Mule’ menu will be moved under ‘Options’.)