electron context menu

Context menu for your Electron app

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JavaScript

electron-context-menu

Context menu for your Electron app

Electron doesn’t have a built-in context menu. You’re supposed to handle that yourself. But it’s both tedious and hard to get right. This module gives you a nice extensible context menu with spellchecking and items like Cut/Copy/Paste for text, Save Image for images, and Copy Link for links. It also adds an Inspect Element menu item when in development to quickly view items in the inspector like in Chrome.

This package can only be used in the main process.

Install

npm install electron-context-menu

Requires Electron 30 or later.

Usage

import {app, BrowserWindow} from 'electron';
import contextMenu from 'electron-context-menu';

contextMenu({
	showSaveImageAs: true
});

let mainWindow;
(async () => {
	await app.whenReady();

	mainWindow = new BrowserWindow();
})();

Advanced example:

import {app, BrowserWindow, shell} from 'electron';
import contextMenu from 'electron-context-menu';

contextMenu({
	prepend: (defaultActions, parameters, browserWindow) => [
		{
			label: 'Rainbow',
			// Only show it when right-clicking images
			visible: parameters.mediaType === 'image'
		},
		{
			label: 'Search Google for “{selection}”',
			// Only show it when right-clicking text
			visible: parameters.selectionText.trim().length > 0,
			click: () => {
				shell.openExternal(`https://google.com/search?q=${encodeURIComponent(parameters.selectionText)}`);
			}
		}
	]
});

let mainWindow;
(async () => {
	await app.whenReady();

	mainWindow = new BrowserWindow();
})();

The return value of contextMenu() is a function that disposes of the created event listeners:

const dispose = contextMenu();

dispose();

API

contextMenu(options?)

Creates a context menu and returns a dispose function.

options

Type: object

window

Type: BrowserWindow | BrowserView | WebViewTag | WebContents

Window or WebView to add the context menu to.

When not specified, the context menu will be added to all existing and new windows.

prepend

Type: Function

Should return an array of MenuItem’s to be prepended to the context menu.

The first argument is an array of default actions that can be used. The second argument is this parameters object. The third argument is the BrowserWindow the context menu was requested for. The fourth argument is the context menu event.

MenuItem labels may contain the placeholder {selection} which will be replaced by the currently selected text as described in options.labels.

append

Type: Function

Should return an array of MenuItem’s to be appended to the context menu.

MenuItem labels may contain the placeholder {selection} which will be replaced by the currently selected text as described in options.labels.

showLearnSpelling

Type: boolean
Default: true

Show the Learn Spelling {selection} menu item when right-clicking text.

The spellcheck will only show when right-clicking misspelled words.

showLookUpSelection

Type: boolean
Default: true

Show the Look Up {selection} menu item when right-clicking text.

showSearchWithGoogle

Type: boolean
Default: true

Show the Search with Google menu item when right-clicking text.

showSelectAll

Type: boolean
Default: false on macOS, true on Windows and Linux

Show the Select All menu item when right-clicking in a window.