21.15 Menu Bars

You can toggle the use of menu bars with M-x menu-bar-mode. With no argument, this command toggles Menu Bar mode, a global minor mode. With an argument, the command turns Menu Bar mode on if the argument is positive, off if the argument is not positive. To control the use of menu bars at startup, customize the variable menu-bar-mode.

Expert users often turn off the menu bar, especially on text terminals, where this makes one additional line available for text. If the menu bar is off, you can still pop up a menu of its contents with C-mouse-3 on a display which supports pop-up menus. Or you can enable context-menu-mode and customize the variable context-menu-functions to pop up a context menu with mouse-3. See Mouse Clicks for Menus.

See The Menu Bar, for information on how to invoke commands with the menu bar. See X Options and Resources, for how to customize the menu bar menus’ visual appearance.