Technical Q&A

TB46 - System Menu IDs (17-December-98)

Q: The Help, Keyboard, and Application menus at the right of the Macintosh menu bar don't have text titles that can be included in a command string in the way that "File" or "Edit" can be. Do these menus always have the same menu ID?

A: Yes. The menu IDs of the Help, Keyboard, and Application menus are always the same, so the menus can always be identified by their IDs via a call to GetMenuHandle:

enum
{
    kMenuHelpID             = -16490, // value also in "Balloons.h"
    kMenuKeyboardID         = -16491,
    kMenuApplicationID      = -16489
};

Note that passing kMenuHelpID to GetMenuItemHandle may obtain the menu handle of the global help menu, which is generally not what you want. To customize the Help menu, call HMGetHelpMenuHandle.