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Menu Resources
From the artice in MacAddict Magazine

By:David K. Every
©Copyright 1999


The Menus -- you'll find more menus in Mac programs than in all the restaurants in New York City combined, but hacking them couldn't be easier. The resource you need to worry about is blatantly labeled MENU. And it's simple to tweak the text in these menus to say any silly thing you want.

Fickle Finder

There are a few programs that don't use Menu resources, and the Finder is one of them. Of course, the Finder still has menus; it just creates them at startup from strings.

There are quite a few different types of menu resources:

  • MENU - the basic resource, used for most things.
  • MBAR - is the menu bar (or a grouping of MENU's), you may rarely want to remove a whole MENU out of the menu bar, and this is where you'd do that.
  • hmnu - help menu (Balloons)

Now in addition to the basic types, there are some additional information some programs use for Menus. Different development tools (called frameworks) keep additional menu information in their own additions. These are:

  • cmnu - MacApp uses this to keep command ID's.
  • CMNU - MacApp uses this to keep command ID's. (I forget which one is the older variant)
  • fmnu - finder menu -- remember, the finder is a little weird in how it works with menus.
  • Mcmd - PowerPlant uses this to keep command ID's.
  • MDEF - menu definition, used if programmers want to add custom code to how a menu will behave. So they can add in things like Pictures, or tear off menus and so on.
  • xmnu - appearance menus

You are probable only going to want to have the plain old MENUs. Here are a couple of hacks that will you show you the most common things you are going to want to hack.

Menu shortcut hacking is the most useful kind of hack because it can increase your productivity! Wow, a useful hack, what is the world coming to? Have fun with menu hacking and maybe it can even make your life a little easier.


Created: JULY/98
Updated: 11/09/02


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