paseo/docs/menus.md

Menus

One engine, in packages/app/src/components/ui/menu/. dropdown-menu.tsx and context-menu.tsx are wrappers over it and differ only in what opens them — a press, or a long press / right click. Import the DropdownMenu* or ContextMenu* names as before; reach for @/components/ui/menu directly only when you are building a third trigger shape.

Do not add a third menu implementation. The two that existed were byte-identical from computePosition down, and the copies drifted: only one of them ever grew a sheet.

Two presentations

MenuRoot picks one from form factor, never from platform — a tablet in a narrow split view sheets the same way a phone does.

Screen	Surface	Submenus
Wide	Popover anchored to the trigger	Flyout overlapping the row, opened by hover intent
Compact, compactMode="sheet"	Bottom sheet	The page is replaced in place, with a back header
Compact, default	Popover	Same as wide

compactMode defaults to "popover", so adopting the sheet is per-menu. That is deliberate: flipping every menu in the app to sheets at once is not a change anyone can review. Opt a menu in when you have actually looked at it on a phone.

ContextMenu is the exception: it defaults to compactMode="sheet" and enables native long press. Disable mobile triggering explicitly on draggable rows, where long press belongs to drag instead.

When the items differ per form factor

A menu whose contents depend on what else is on screen gets one component per surface, not one component with isMobile branches inside it. The workspace header menu is the example (packages/app/src/screens/workspace/workspace-header-menu.tsx): compact has no tab strip, so it carries new-tab actions, while wide leaves those to the strip's + menu and lists workspace actions only. Items both surfaces share live in one component that each menu renders, from the same callbacks, so the two can't drift.

Selecting an item on iOS

An item that closes the menu runs its action after a fixed grace period on iOS, not immediately: a native presenter launched while UIKit is still tearing down the surface can hang. Both surfaces unmount the moment the menu closes, so the wait is a timer rather than the surface's own dismissal callback — a callback fired from inside a subtree that is being removed is racing its own removal, and it loses. Selections used to be dropped entirely for exactly that reason.

The consequence for callers: an onSelect on iOS runs a beat after the press. Don't add a second delay on top of it, and don't read state that the same press mutated.

This is why a row inside a menu surface goes through selectItem rather than calling its handler from its own Pressable. MenuItem is not the only row shape on the engine — ComposerTrackRow is another, with its own icons and hover-revealed actions — but both hand the press to the engine and take closeOnSelect to say whether choosing them ends the surface. A row that owns its press outright leaves the surface open behind whatever it opened, and skips the iOS wait.

A row whose result opens a sheet passes closeOnSelect={false}: the sheet stacks over the menu sheet and uncovers it on close, so the menu is where the user lands next. A row that opens a tab closes, because the tab replaces the pane the menu belongs to. The subagents track asks the layout store which one a row is (useSubagentOpensInSheet), since the answer changes with the layout.

Pages

A submenu is a page, declared as data on the surface and reached by a MenuSubTrigger whose id matches:

<MenuSurface pages={pages} sheetTitle="Display">
  <MenuSubTrigger id="grouping" value="Project">
    Grouping
  </MenuSubTrigger>
</MenuSurface>

Pages are data rather than nested children because the popover renders them as siblings of the root surface — a flyout nested inside the root's box would be clipped by its overflow: hidden. Declaring them separately is what lets one model drive both presentations.

menu-navigation.ts holds that model, and it is pure: the open flyout chain and the mobile push stack are the same path, so the popover renders every entry in it and the sheet renders only the last. Nothing else differs between the two.

Opening a submenu truncates the path to the depth of the trigger that opened it. Without that, sliding the pointer across a row of triggers would stack up every flyout it passed instead of swapping between them.

A page that takes input

A menu page can hold a small form — MenuTextField is the field for it, drawn as a row's own fill so its text lands on the same rail as the labels above it. Two things have to be true for that page, and both are set on the page definition rather than discovered later:

• hoverIntent: false. A branch you skim is opened and closed by the pointer; a form is not. Without this the page opens on a pointer that was only passing through, and dismisses itself — draft and all — the moment your hands move to the keyboard and the mouse drifts off the flyout. While such a page is open, the whole surface stops closing on hover, because the parent flyout leads back to the same dismissal.
• The compact presentation has to be a sheet. MenuTextField resolves to BottomSheetTextInput on compact native, which reads the sheet's context and has none in a popover.

The sheet keeps keyboardBehavior="interactive". extend grows a sheet to its largest snap point, and with enableDynamicSizing that point is the content's own height — a short page does not grow, and the keyboard comes up over the field you are typing into.

Hover intent

A flyout overlaps its parent by 5pt rather than sitting beside it. With a gap there is a strip of backdrop between the two that belongs to neither surface, and every pixel of it is a chance to dismiss the menu you are reaching for. Overlapping deletes the strip; don't reintroduce the gap and try to cover it with a longer timer.

On top of that, a flyout opens after the pointer rests ~90ms, closes ~260ms after it leaves, and cancels its own pending close while the pointer is inside it. The grace still matters because the pointer crosses sibling rows on the way down into the flyout.

Hover lives on a plain View, never on a Pressable — see hover.md, which owns that rule. Hover only fires on web, which is exactly where flyouts exist; everywhere else the page opens on press.

Item states

selected and active are different questions and must not be merged.

Prop	Means	Draws
selected	This is the chosen value	A check, and nothing else
active	This row's submenu is open	The fill, and no check

selected also announces itself as aria-checked, so a multi-select page is audible as the list of on/off things it is.

A selected row does not get a background. A check and a fill are two separate claims about the same state, and showing both makes a chosen row compete with the row the pointer is actually on. showSelectedCheck moves the check to a reserved leading column when a group needs to stay aligned whether ticked or not; otherwise it sits at the trailing edge and the leading slot is free for the option's icon.

Give options icons; leave the root rows without them. The root is labels and their current values, and a column of icons there is decoration competing with the values you actually came to read.

Surface details

• The hover fill is inset from the surface's edges and rounded — a chip inside the menu, not a band across it. The inset is taken out of the row, never added to it: padding gives up what margin takes, so labels sit at the same 13pt they always did. Insetting by growing the row is how the menu ends up taller than it started.
• A row is as tall as what is driving it — 28pt for a pointer, 40pt below md for a thumb. The split is on breakpoint, not on presentation: the compact popover that compactMode defaults to is worked with a thumb just as a sheet is, and sizing off the sheet would leave it at the desktop height. md is where useIsCompactFormFactor divides, so row height and the popover/sheet choice turn over together.
• The desktop height only holds because the label's lineHeight is pinned — 18 line + 8 padding + 2 border is exactly 28. Leave it to the platform and content outgrows minHeight, which then does nothing. Compact is the other way round: minHeight leads and the label centres in it.
• A row owns its fill; MenuPage owns the spacing between rows. The vertical inset above the first row and below the last, and the gap between rows, are the page's — one knob each, MENU_ROW_GAP being the one a redesign turns. A row that carried vertical margin would be serving both at once, and since margins don't collapse it would land as one unit at the edges and two between rows, so shrinking the gap would eat the inset with it. Horizontal inset does stay on the row: there is one left edge and one right edge, so nothing is doubling up.
• MenuPage is also what provides a page's depth, so the popover and the sheet cannot disagree about what a page is. Every entry point goes through it — root, flyout, pushed sheet page.
• The gap reaches a page's direct children. A group of rows wrapped in a View of its own drops out of it; at the current gap of zero there is nothing to lose, but anything above zero wants that wrapper to carry the page style too.
• The separator is the one row-level thing that asks for vertical space of its own, and now that rows carry none, that is still one number controlling one gap. It takes no horizontal margin and the page has no horizontal padding, so the rule runs the full width of the surface.
• Separators use borderAccent, the same colour the surface outlines itself with. border sits between surface1 and surface2, which put it within a hair of the hover fill and made separators disappear against a hovered row.

When a decision earns a submenu

Put a decision behind a submenu when its options are not the point — the current value is. The root row then reads as the answer (Grouping Project ›) and costs one line instead of one line per option. A menu whose every option is on screen at once does not survive its third decision.

Independent toggles stay on their page as a checkmark list. A pick-one group can share that page below a MenuSeparator; make selecting the checked row clear it, so "none" doesn't need a row of its own.

Gotchas

• Released height. Reanimated's web entering animation leaves an inline height snapshot on the surface. AnchoredSurface clears it, and a revision prop re-clears it when content identity changes — a pushed page taller than the one it replaced is clipped without that.
• Animate only once placed. The same snapshot carries top/left, and Reanimated writes it back 750ms after mount. AnchoredSurface remounts the surface when its position resolves so the entering animation never ends at the off-screen measuring position; on a slow machine that write moved the open menu back off-screen.
• Sheets size to content. enableDynamicSizing, not fixed snap points. A pushed page is rarely the height of the page before it.
• The sheet's content is teleported out of the menu's subtree, so MenuSheetSurface rebuilds both menu contexts through the sheet's contextBridge. Providing them around the modal puts them on the wrong side of the portal and every item inside throws. Gotcha 7 in floating-panels.md.
• One overlay per menu. Submenus render inside their parent's layer and paint no second backdrop, so there is exactly one Modal on native no matter how deep the menu goes.
• Sheet stacking and backdrop dismissal belong to IsolatedBottomSheetModal. Menus only request a backdrop opacity. See floating-panels.md.
• A menu closes when its panel leaves the screen. MenuSurface closes the menu when its retained panel goes inactive. Hiding the surface alone leaves the open state behind, and the menu would reappear with the panel on the next tab switch.
• Retained panels own visibility. The shared menu surface unmounts when its panel becomes inactive. An async action can navigate before its menu closes; a hidden panel must not leave a portal backdrop blocking the destination. On web the chat suspends one commit after it goes inactive, and that inactive commit is where the surface unmounts.
• Anchoring, flipping, and edge clamping live in components/ui/anchor.ts, shared with the hover card, and are unit-tested. Fix positioning bugs there, not at a call site.
• Everything else about floating surfaces on Android — Portal/Modal escape, lifecycle gates, status-bar offset, the open flash — is in floating-panels.md.