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About Customizing Toolbars and Menus

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With toolbars you can organize the commands in Visual C++ the way you want to so you can find and use them quickly. You can easily customize toolbars — for example, you can add and remove menus and buttons, change the image or text for a button, create your own custom toolbars, hide or display toolbars, resize, and move toolbars. In previous versions of Visual C++, toolbars only contained buttons. Now toolbars can contain buttons, menus, or a combination of both.

The Menu Bar is a special toolbar at the top of the screen that contains menus such as File, Edit, and Build. You can customize the Menu Bar the same way you customize any toolbar; for example, you can quickly add and remove buttons and menus. You can add existing commands to these menus and delete commands. If you delete a default command (a command supplied with the Visual C++ user interface) from a menu, you can choose later to put it back or add it to a different menu or toolbar.

The only differences between the Menu Bar and other toolbars are:

  • The Menu Bar always spans the full width of the window when docked horizontally.

  • You cannot hide the Menu Bar, except when you are editing in full-screen mode. When you begin editing full-screen mode, the Menu Bar is hidden automatically, but you can choose to display it.

A menu displays a list of commands. Some of these commands have images next to them so you can more quickly identify the command you want. You can create a toolbar button, which may make the command easier to use.

Depending on your workspace preferences, and the size of your screen, you can display as many toolbars as you want, or none at all. You can move the Menu Bar, even when you cannot hide it.

What do you want to do?

Customize a toolbar or menu