XPLM Menus API

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Plug-ins can create menus in the menu bar of X-Plane. This is done by creating a menu and then creating items. Menus are referred to by an opaque ID. Items are referred to by (zero-based) index number.

Menus are "sandboxed" between plugins - no plugin can access the menus of any other plugin. Furthermore, all menu indices are relative to your plugin's menus only; if your plugin creates two sub-menus in the Plugins menu at different times, it doesn't matter how many other plugins also create sub-menus of Plugins in the intervening time: your sub-menus will be given menu indices 0 and 1. (The SDK does some work in the back-end to filter out menus that are irrelevant to your plugin in order to deliver this consistency for each plugin.)

When you create a menu item, you specify how we should handle clicks on that menu item. You can either have the XPLM trigger a callback (the XPLMMenuHandler_f associated with the menu that contains the item), or you can simply have a command be triggered (with no associated call to your menu handler). The advantage of the latter method is that X-Plane will display any keyboard shortcuts associated with the command. (In contrast, there are no keyboard shortcuts associated with menu handler callbacks with specific parameters.)

Menu text in X-Plane is UTF8; X-Plane's character set covers latin, greek and cyrillic characters, Katakana, as well as some Japanese symbols. Some APIs have a inDeprecatedAndIgnored parameter that used to select a character set; since X-Plane 9 all localization is done via UTF-8 only.