The Menu widget

As its name implies, the Menu widget is a widget that can hold many selectable options. Each option can be assigned a label, such as paste, and a command, which (like many other widgets) allows us to call a Python function when the user clicks on it.

We will be adding two different types of menus to our text editor in this chapter: a menu bar along the top of the window and a right-click context menu. Both are implemented using the same widget, but the way in which the widgets are added to the application differs.

Let's take some time to look at each method we will be using to add menus into our text editor, beginning with the top menu bar.

A menu bar

The top menu bar of an application usually just contains other menus, such as file and edit. These are known as "cascades" in Tkinter, and are essentially a menu inside a menu. This may be confusing at first, so let's begin with a very simple example to demonstrate the difference between a menu and a cascade.

Create a new Python...