A Tab Bar Menu in Emacs

One of the first customizations folks make to their Emacs is to hide the menu bar. This makes some sense if you’re using a completion UI like Ivy: it’s usually faster and more convenient to find an option using fuzzy completion in the minibuffer than it is to mouse over a series of menus. Also, the menu covers only options that are relevant to the end-user. If you want fine-grained customization or access to Emacs’ API, you’ll need to use a different interface (like customize). The menu is thus seen as a crutch for new users to outgrow.

It’s a shame, though. The menu bar serves two useful purposes:

  1. Discoverability: M-x and the describe-* commands are good for “keyword searches”, i.e finding exact names for features that you know exist, including a rough idea of what it might be called ("…probably ends in -hook?"). But what about the unknown unkowns? Unless you chance upon features you want when looking for something else, you’re out of luck. The menu bar is a helpful guide to discover features. CUA-mode, one of the most common new user requests is front and center in the menu bar:

  2. Organization: The menu bar for any major-mode usually contains a comprehensive collection of options for that mode. Notwithstanding some recent improvements to command filtering, the M-x interface throws up the entire bag of Emacs’ commands at you irrespective of the context in which it’s called. The describe-* commands are worse. In contrast, the menu bar changes depending on what modes you have active, and generally provides a relevant set of actions. For example, the menu bar in programming modes provides options for linting, compilation, tracing, code folding and so on.1 The menu in LaTeX or Org-mode is quite different.

But if we’re honest, the real reason the menu bar is avoided tends to be more superficial: it takes up space and does not compose visually with Emacs’ theming.

Let’s address this too. There are at least two non-invasive approaches to using the menu in Emacs.

The text-mode menu

There’s a text-mode menu built into Emacs. Calling tmm-menubar (bound to M-` by default) will allow menu-bar access from the minibuffer (or equivalent), helping with discoverability and organization as before:

The tab-bar menu

The second method requires Emacs 28. You can shove the menu into the tab-bar:

To do this, you add the built-in function tab-bar-format-menu-bar to tab-bar-format, which is the list of widgets to show in the tab bar.

(add-to-list 'tab-bar-format #'tab-bar-format-menu-bar)

Contrary to its name, the tab-bar can show arbitrary information. For example, the system time and battery information in addition to the menu and open tabs:

I use tabs (as workspaces) and the tab-bar already, so I prefer this method for accessing the menu occasionally.2

  1. Of course, this supposes that the relevant features are available in Emacs either as built-ins or through an installed package. ↩︎

  2. I changed the menu button text to 𝞴 from the default to further shorten it. ↩︎