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.

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.

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

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 by the same amount on every side and rounded — a chip inside the menu, not a band across it. The inset is taken out of the row, never added to it: horizontally padding gives up what margin takes so labels don't move, and vertically the fill is shorter by the same amount so the row pitch is unchanged. Insetting by growing the row is how the menu ends up taller than it started.
• The fill's height only holds because the label's lineHeight is pinned. Leave it to the platform and content outgrows minHeight, which then does nothing.
• The item's inset is the menu's only spacing. Rows sit apart because each holds itself in, and a separator gets clearance from its neighbours for free. Don't give the separator a margin of its own — that is two numbers controlling one gap, and they will disagree.
• 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.
• Sheets size to content. enableDynamicSizing, not fixed snap points. A pushed page is rarely the height of the page before it.
• 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.
• Anchoring, flipping, and edge clamping live in menu-anchor.ts 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.