Support for system-style menus?

SDL Development
1

I use SDL2, and I would like to put menus in the menubar. The way the system likes to do it: top of the screen on the Mac, top of the window on Windows, etc. Is there any facility in SDL2 to access these system-style menus? Or has anyone written an add-on to do so?

Thanks,
Ken

2

I have heard of people embedding SDL inside Qt and windows apps, so I
suspect you could use something like SDL_CreateWindowFrom
https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL_CreateWindowFrom. I’m sure there is someone
on here more information, but that gives you a clear path forward, I think.On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 5:23 PM, joymaker wrote:

I use SDL2, and I would like to put menus in the menubar. The way the
system likes to do it: top of the screen on the Mac, top of the window on
Windows, etc. Is there any facility in SDL2 to access these system-style
menus? Or has anyone written an add-on to do so?

Thanks,
Ken

SDL mailing list
SDL at lists.libsdl.org
http://lists.libsdl.org/listinfo.cgi/sdl-libsdl.org

3

I don’t think a small crossplatform solution that just provides a
menubar exists.
You could use GTK or Qt or WxWidgets, but that seems like a huge
dependency for such a simple thing.

FWIW, SDL :: View topic - Adding drop-down menus to SDL surface window? has some
information on how to do this on Windows
There probably is a standard way to do this on OSX, too.
For Linux (or Unices using X11 in general) it#s harder, because there
menubars are provided by Qt, GTK or whatever you’re using.

Related: [OFFICIAL] tinyfiledialogs v3.18.2 C C++ download | SourceForge.net provides file
pickers and some other very basic stuff, no menubar though.

Similar: GitHub - mlabbe/nativefiledialog: A tiny, neat C library that portably invokes native file open and save dialogs. - it /might/ be
possible to enhance this one to provide a menu bar (with tinyfiledialogs
that doesn’t seem feasible as it seems to rely on calling tools like
Xdialog, Zenity etc which do not interact with your SDL window at all
and thus can’t modify it to show a menubar).

Cheers,
DanielOn 26.01.2017 23:23, joymaker wrote:

I use SDL2, and I would like to put menus in the menubar. The way the
system likes to do it: top of the screen on the Mac, top of the window
on Windows, etc. Is there any facility in SDL2 to access these
system-style menus? Or has anyone written an add-on to do so?

Thanks,
Ken

4

For at least Windows and Mac OS X where the system has a known framework to provide menus, could there be an API to construct a menu and attach it to a window? The API could loosely wrap HMENU in Windows and NSMenu in Mac OS X.

I’m currently doing such an abstraction through a heavily modified SDL1 library in DOSBox-X, perhaps it could serve as a starting point? It is written to draw it’s own menus if neither Windows nor Mac OS X because I’d rather not make GTK+ or Qt a dependency of DOSBox-X. SDL2 builds have drawn their own menus so far.

Additional support code for Mac OS X:

I’m asking if it can be made part of the standard library instead of letting the in-tree copy of SDL2 bitrot with custom modifications that deviate from this active project. There are clearly contributers to DOSBox-X that would like to see system menus in both SDL1 and SDL2 builds.

No hurry, just a request.