Command Menus

At the top of the screen, there's a typical application toplevel menubar:

Sheet  Edit  View  Column  ...

You can press Ctrl+H to activate the Help menu (shown in the upper right). Then you can use the arrow keys (or hjkl of course) to navigate the various commands and submenus.

Enter or Space will execute the command or dive into the submenu.

q or Esc or Ctrl+Q will leave the menu without taking an action.

Other ways of opening the menu

Alt+S or Alt+E etc will open that specific submenu (see the underlined letter). On Macos, Option+S etc should work the same (with the exception of Option+E, which needs to be Option+E+Space).

You can also click on the menu with the mouse to open it, as well as clicking on the various menu items to navigate to them. Click on the already active menu item will execute the command or navigate into the submenu.

Click off the menu to deactivate it.

Menu annotations

The … annotation, like in traditional GUI menus, indicates that the command requires further input. The ⎘ annotation on a command is specific to VisiData, and means that the command will push a sheet onto the sheet stack, so your data context will change. You can always return to the previous sheet with q (or if you like taking the long way around, the "Sheet»Quit»Top sheet" command in the menu).

Configuration Options

To make the top menu line disappear (as it looked pre-2.6)

options.disp_menu = False

The menu can still be activated with Ctrl+H or the Alt+ keys as above. The menu system cannot be entirely disabled.

Theme options

As with most VisiData display elements, the menu can be altered to taste. These options are available to change the colors and displayed chars:

• color_menu
• color_menu_active
• color_menu_spec
• color_menu_help
• disp_menu_boxchars
• disp_menu_more
• disp_menu_input
• disp_menu_push

Plugin API for adding new menu items

The menu can be extended with additional commands. See the plugin API.