Both Alventis and Designer allow you full control over their toolbars and menus. Firstly, as we have explained earlier, toolbars and menus are almost entirely mutually-interchangeable. They can contain all the same items, be it buttons or combo boxes. The only difference is the way they present these items to you. You can use either or both, whatever you find convenient. Note that only the main application form's bars/menu are customizable.

You can access the customization pop-up menu by right-clicking anywhere within the menu/bar area. From this menu, you can hide/unhide the bars. You can also access the Customize dialog.

The Customize dialog has 3 tabs. The Toolbars tab displays a list of existing bars. You can hide/unhide the bars using the corresponding checkboxes. You can create new toolbars, which you can subsequently rename or delete. You can also reset the selected bar/menu to its defaults, which correspond to its "as installed" state. This will discard all your customizations, if any, so be careful.

The Commands tab lists all available commands (or items) grouped in Categories seen on the left. Pick a Category to see its commands. You can place any command onto the bar/menu of your choice simply by dragging it in the desired position and dropping it there.

To put an item onto a menu, drag it to the menu caption first – this will open the corresponding menu.

Rearrange existing items using drag-and-drop as well. To remove an item from a bar/menu, drag it "away into nowhere".

You can create separators between items by dragging one item just a little bit away from the other.

For instance, if [A][B] are adjacent buttons, you'd drag [B] to the right about 1/3 of its width to obtain [A]|[B]. You can't create new items, obviously. You can create new toolbars, but unfortunately, not menus. This is why a "spare" sub-menu called Custom has been pre-created for you. You will find this empty sub-menu at the bottom of the Built-in Menus category.

The Options tab offers a few fairly self-explanatory options. Note that the Show shortcut keys in ToolTips option does not work since Alventis and Designer use an alternative mechanism for shortcut processing.

You can move the menu and the toolbars by dragging them with the mouse. Grab them by their grab handle at the very left edge of the bar/menu. Grabbing close to the center of the left edge works best. You can place more than one of them on the same line (including the menu). You can place them either at the top of the application workspace or at the bottom.

InstaButton Multiplicity. InstaButtons deserve a special mention here since this is the type of button you are most likely to want to clone and multiply on the toolbars. Toolbars are more practical than menus for this purpose, so we'll be saying "bars" in the following discussion, but everything applies to menus as well. So, you want 5 Font InstaButtons next to each other? Open the Customize dialog by right-clicking on the bar area and picking it from the pop-up menu.

In the Commands tab, find the right Category (which for Font would likely be Format), then find Font in the Commands list. Drag the Font item and drop it onto the toolbar where you want it. Repeat as many times as you want. Same basic steps apply to all other InstaButtons (and all items in general, of course). You may find it convenient to create a whole new toolbar (see the Toolbars tab and an earlier discussion) to hold all your InstaButtons, but this is entirely up to your taste.

Hiding/Unhiding the Menu. We have seen how you can hide/unhide the bars, but not the menu. This can be done from the application's System menu. Click on the application's icon on the left-hand side of its titlebar (or hit Alt-Space) to invoke this menu.

The Main Menu Bar command will toggle the menu on/off.

Bar and Menu Style. You can change the visual appearance of all application bars and menus. The 5 possible options are available from the  Settingsdialog (the Settings command under the File menu). In the Alventis tradition, your changes take effect immediately, so you can see which look you prefer right away. You can still Cancel your changes though.

KeyMap and Keyboard Shortcuts

In both Alventis and Designer, all keyboard shortcuts are user-definable. You can edit them in the KeyMap form. Note that this is a form and not a dialog: you can leave it open as a "floating reference" or while testing your newly-assigned shortcuts.

All available commands are listed in a single grid. The only columns you can edit are Comment, where you can jot-down a little note to yourself, and the Key 1/2/3/4 columns that specify and allow editing the shortcuts. Yes, there can be as many as 4 shortcuts per command!

You will have noticed that the InstaButton Index column displays mysterious numbers for some, but not other commands. The numbers enumerate InstaButtons. A single InstaButton can have multiple independent "incarnations" on the menus and bars. You can assign separate shortcuts to each. Note that it may not be immediately obvious which of the enumerated InstaButtons is which. They should be enumerated in the order in which they were created, but if you don't remember, you may have to resort to trial-and-error approach to identify them.

The Comment column should tell you where the corresponding InstaButton is located (on which toolbar or menu). You can change the default Comment text if you want.

There's another trick to the InstaButton shortcuts. Remember how most of them work (e.g., Font): clicking it applies its stored attribute(s) to the selected item(s) (text, record, item – whatever), and Shift-clicking it sets its attribute(s) to those of the selected item. You can make this work with keyboard shortcuts too: assign two shortcuts to the InstaButton – one with and one without the Shift key. For example, Ctrl-F11 and Ctrl-Shift-F11. The one invoked with the Shift key depressed will "set" the InstaButton, while the one with no Shift will "use" it. Basically, any InstaButton shortcut with the Shift key will be interpreted as a Shift-click on the InstaButton.

Setting Shortcuts. This part is easy. Get into the cell you want as you would with any grid: focus the desired Key cell and hit Enter or click the already-focused cell with the mouse. Once in the cell, just press the desired shortcut on the keyboard. You'll see the Ctrl-Alt-Shift- key "prefixes" appear and disappear as you press and release them. If you change your mind, hit Escape to abandon the cell. You can clear an existing shortcut by hitting Delete. Duplicate shortcuts are not allowed, and KeyMap will tell you what existing command is using it, if you enter an existing one.

Any shortcut changes you make take effect immediately, so you can test the results right after setting the shortcut (and without leaving the KeyMap form – unless the command in question is only applicable to some particular "place", such as a Memo).