Customizing menu

To customize a menu, right-click on the item to be customized and then select the “Customize Menu…” item:

Here you can choose the tabs with the settings on the left.

Options

• View Mode – Menu appearance, described in detail in chapter View Modes
• Icons Size – Icons size
• Arrange – Arranging icons
• Max menu width, Max menu height – Menu dimensions limits. The zero values will reset the menu to the default dimensions.
• Show menu caption – Disable or enable menu title.
• Disable tips – Enable or disable tips for all menu items.
• Docking point – Location of the point to attach the menu to.
• Menu align – Menu alignment related to Docking point.

The “Docking point” and “Menu align” settings allow you to create truly innovative combinations of menus:

The following settings were used in this example:

First-level menu:

• View Mode: Icons only
• Columns: 1
• Docking point: default
• Menu align: default

Second-level menu:

• View Mode: Icons only
• Columns: 4
• Docking point: default
• Menu align: default

Third-level menu:

• View Mode: Icons only
• Columns: 1
• Docking point: Left-Bottom
• Menu align: Left-Top

Overlay image

Overlay image is displayed under all menu items. The transparency of the image, its position within a menu, and its dimensions are up to you. It is not recommended that you use overlay images with no transparency. Please note that using overlay images may affect the performance. Although it makes the menus look really pretty.

We will now take a closer look at overlay image settings:

• Image file – Full path to overlay image file. You can type the path by hand or click on the “Browse…” button and select the file in the explorer window that appears. True Launch Bar supports the most popular image types: BMP, PNG, JPEG, and GIF.
• Transparency – The slider sets the transparency of the image.
• Horizontal alignment – Horizontal position of the image. May be set to: left, right, and center.
• Vertical alignment – Vertical position of the image. May be set to: top, bottom, and center.
• Horizontal stretch – Stretch image horizontally.
• Vertical stretch – Stretch image vertically.
• Constrain Proportions – Preserve image ratio during stretching. This setting is ignored if neither Horizontal nor Vertical stretch is enabled.

As it was mentioned already, using overlay images can negatively affect the performance. This is especially true when you apply stretching.

True Launch Bar can save overlay image with the toolbar if the “Save image with toolbar” option is enabled. When the image is saved with the toolbar, the image file will be copied to the toolbar folder. Later on, you can select that image on the popup list. The image is also preserved when the toolbar is backed up or restored.

Filtering folder

The content of any virtual folder can be filtered by a number of terms. You can set a mask for files to be shown or hidden by TLB. You can also select the files that were created or modified within a specific number of days. There are two types of filtering available.

Permanent filtering (Apply filter to all new files/folders enabled). With the permanent filtering enabled, TLB will always filter the applicable files, and the menu will have no hidden files.

Temporary filtering (Apply filter to all new files/folders disabled). With the temporary filtering enabled, TLB will only hide files that do not meet the filtration terms. This happens only once. The filtration will not be applied to the new files. Moreover, TLB will set the “Hidden” attribute on all files that do not meet the filtration terms, and you can unhide a necessary file at any time by toggling the “Show hidden” option.