Adding a menu and menu items

Menus offer a very compact way of presenting a large number of choices to the user without cluttering the interface. Tkinter offers the following two widgets to handle menus:

• Menu widget: This appears at the top of applications, which is always visible to end users
• Menu items: These show up when a user clicks on a menu 

We will use the following code to add Toplevel menu buttons:

my_menu = Menu(parent, **options)

For example, to add a File menu, we will use the following code:

# Adding Menubar in the widget
menu_bar = Menu(root)
file_menu = Menu(menu_bar, tearoff=0)
# all file menu-items will be added here next
menu_bar.add_cascade(label='File', menu=file_menu)
root.config(menu=menu_bar)

The following screenshot is the result of the preceding code (2.01.py):

Similarly, we will add the Edit, View, and About menus (2.01.py).

We will also define a constant as follows:

PROGRAM_NAME = " Footprint Editor "

Then, we'll set the root window tile, as follows:

root.title(PROGRAM_NAME)

Most Linux platforms support tear-off menus. When tearoff is set to 1 (enabled), the menu appears with a dotted line above the menu options. Clicking on the dotted line enables the user to literally tear off or separate the menu from the top. However, as this is not a cross-platform feature, we have decided to disable tear-off, marking it as tearoff = 0.