Keyboard Support in Windows Forms Menu (Menus)

14 Jun 20211 minute to read

The menu control supports keyboard functionalities for navigation and selection of menu items. In this topic such keyboard support is discussed.

Displaying shortcut text in menu item

The menu items can be selected and the respective action can be done by specifying the shortcuts via the Shortcut property of the menu item. The below code snippet shows a shortcut is being assigned to the menu item.

this.barItem1.Shortcut = Shortcut.AltDownArrow;
Me.barItem1.Shortcut = Shortcut.AltDownArrow

Menu item is applied with a shortcut text

Displaying Mnemonic in menu items

The menu items supports to add mnemonic text. As usual, the required mnemonic character is appended with & symbol in the Text property of the menu item. This character can be made visible all the time using the ShowMnemonicUnderlinesAlways property of the menu item.

The below snippet shows the drop down item is applied with the mnemonics.

this.barItem3.Text = "&Copy";
this.barItem3.ShowMnemonicUnderlinesAlways = true;
Me.dropDownItem.Text = "Drop do&wn item"
Me.dropDownItem.ShowMnemonicUnderlinesAlways = true

Menu item with mnemonics