How to use menu bar at the top via mouse?

Question

I am opening emacs in --no-window-system mode and I switched xterm-mouse-mode on. Mouse clicks within a buffer work. However, I want the menu at the top of the window to open when I click on it.

I.e., when I click on File, I want the dropdown menu to show up the list with the options to open a file or to save the current buffer and so on.

What happens actually instead is that on the right half of the shell window a new buffer opens, showing a message like the one visible here: .

How can I get the menu bar at the top of emacs to work as I expect it? I want the ordinary behaviour from all other "normal" GUI editors, which do not operate on the command line. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I want the ordinary behaviour from all other "normal" GUI editors

But you're not running it as a GUI editor, you're running in a terminal.

When menu-bar-mode is enabled (as it is for you), you can type <f10> to open the menus, and then navigate with the keyboard.

Or you can use the menus regardless by typing M-`

You may be able to get some mouse interaction by enabling xterm-mouse-mode in Emacs, but that won't necessarily do what you want for the menus. (In my case clicking on the menu names triggers the M-` behaviour for that menu.)

Answer 2

Indeed, there are two different ways to show TTY menus:

• either tmm-menubar (the "ugly" menu),
• or popup-menu (the "nicer" menu).

It appears <f10> calls popup-menu by default, but this is customizable if ever we want to downgrade this to tmm-menubar:

tty-menu-open-use-tmm is a variable defined in menu-bar.el.gz.

Value
nil


Documentation
If non-nil, <f10> on a TTY will invoke tmm-menubar.

If nil, <f10> will drop down the menu corresponding to the
first (leftmost) menu-bar item; you can select other items by typing
C-f, C-b, <right> and <left>.

This variable was added, or its default value changed, in Emacs 24.4.

Anyway, it's feasible to come up with a lisp solution to have <mouse-1> behave the same.

Here is a proof of concept, inspired by this answer by @npostavs, itself inspired by menu-bar.el:

(defun menu-bar-get-minimal-x (menu-symbol x y)
  (let ((xx (- x 1)))
    (if (< xx tty-menu--initial-menu-x)
        x
      (if (equal (menu-bar-menu-at-x-y xx y (selected-frame)) menu-symbol)
          (menu-bar-get-minimal-x menu-symbol xx y)
        x))))

(defun menu-bar-open-x-y (mouse-event)
  (interactive "e")
  (pcase mouse-event
    (`(mouse-1 (,_ menu-bar (,x . ,y) . ,_))
     (let ((menu (menu-bar-menu-at-x-y x y)))
       (popup-menu (or
                    (lookup-key-ignore-too-long
                     global-map (vector 'menu-bar menu))
                    (lookup-key-ignore-too-long
                     (current-local-map) (vector 'menu-bar menu))
                    (cdar (minor-mode-key-binding (vector 'menu-bar menu)))
                    (mouse-menu-bar-map))
                   (posn-at-x-y (menu-bar-get-minimal-x menu x y) y nil t)
                   nil t)))
    (_ (message "unsupported event %S" (car mouse-event)))))

(define-key global-map (kbd "<menu-bar> <mouse-1>") 'menu-bar-open-x-y)