[Home] Menu Bar

The menu bar is a set of menus at the top of each Emacs frame.

Menu Bar

Emacs with the Menu Bar enabled:

Emacs with the Menu Bar disabled:

Enable the Menu Bar

The menu bar is enabled by default.

You can type the command M-x menu-bar-mode to toggle it on and off temporarily.

To enable it permanently

Add (menu-bar-mode 1) to the end of your init file.

Disable the Menu Bar

To disable the menu bar.

Add (menu-bar-mode -1) to your init file.

Disable the Menu Bar on XEmacs

Add (set-specifier menubar-visible-p nil) to your init file, or use (set-menubar nil). However, this does not work for buffer-local menu bars (and some things might fail when there is no menu bar).

ActiveMenu - Displays the menu bar only when the mouse is close to it.

Access Menu When Disabled

Starting with GnuEmacs 21, you can access the menu as a popup, even when it’s disabled, using ‘C-mouse-3’.

For a similar popup functionality for the tool bar, see ToolBarPlus.

Customizing the Menu Bar

In GnuEmacs, you can customize face ‘menubar’ to change the colors of the menu bar.
If you use X Window, you can customize the menu bar using X Resources (works with both GnuEmacs and XEmacs). Example:

    Emacs.pane.menubar.background: darkGrey
    Emacs.pane.menubar.foreground: black
    Emacs*menubar.margin: 0
    Emacs*shadowThickness: 1

MenuBar