MathLive Context Menu

The MathLive Context Menu provides a set of commands to perform common operations on a mathfield.

To display the context menu:

Right-click on the mathfield
Long press on a mathfield
Tap on the menu button in the mathfield
Press the ALT/OPTION+SPACE, FN+F10 or MENU key on a keyboard

The context menu is fully accessible. It can be navigated using the keyboard, and the menu items are announced by screen readers.

To navigate the context menu, use the arrow keys

An item can also be selected by typing some of the letters of its label.

The default context menu has a set of commands that are useful for most applications, but you can customize the menu by adding or removing commands as needed.

The menu can be filtered to only display a subset of the available commands.

For example, to ommit all commands related to the Compute Engine (such as Evaluate, Simplify and Solve), you can filter the menu items by id:

mf.menuItems = mf.menuItems.filter(item => !item.id.startWith('ce-');

CAUTION: Do not modify the value of the elements of mf.menuItems directly or the menu will not be updated as expected, i.e. do not do mf.menuItems[0].visible = false.

To replace the context menu with your own, set the mf.menuItems property.

The menuItems property is an array of menu items.

Each menu item is an object with the following properties:

type: one of "command", "divider", "submenu", "checkbox", "radio". The default is "command".
label: The label to display for the menu item. This can be a string literal or a function that returns a string. If a function is provided, it will be called to update the label whenever the menu is displayed or when the keyboard modifiers change. The value of the string is interpreted as HTML markup.
ariaLabel and ariaDetails: If provided, these will be used to set the aria-label and aria-details attributes of the menu item. They can also be a string or a function that returns a string.
visible, enabled, checked are status flags that can be set to true or false to control the visibility, enabled state and checked state of the menu item. They can also be a function that returns a boolean.
id: A unique identifier for the menu item. This is the value that will be passed to the menu-select event when the menu item is selected.
data: An arbitrary data payload associated with the menu item, if any.
submenu: If the type is "submenu", an array of menu items to display when the menu item is selected.
onMenuSelect: A function handler that is called when the menu item is selected.

mf. menuItems = [
  {
    label: 'Copy',
    onMenuSelect: () => console.log('Copy')
  },
  {
    label: 'Paste',
    onMenuSelect: () => console.log('Paste');
  },
  {
    type: 'divider'
  },
  {
    label: 'Submenu',
    submenu: [
      {
        label: 'Submenu 1',
        onMenuSelect: () => console.log('Submenu 1');
      },
      {
        label: 'Submenu 2',
        onMenuSelect: () => console.log('Submenu 2');
      }
    ]
  },
];

When a menu item is selected, a menu-select custom event is dispatched.

The detail property of the event contains the following properties:

id: The id of the menu item that was selected.
label: The label of the menu item that was selected.
data: The data payload associated with the menu item, if any.
modifiers: An object containing the state of the modifier keys when the menu item was selected. The following properties are defined:
- altKey
- ctrlKey
- metaKey
- shiftKey

The example above can be rewritten to use the menu-select event instead of the onMenuSelect handler. Note that in this case, the menu items have an id property, which is used to identify the menu item that was selected.

mf. menuItems = [
  {
    label: 'Copy',
    id: 'copy'
  },
  {
    label: 'Paste',
    id: 'paste'
  },
  {
    type: 'divider'
  },
  {
    label: 'Submenu',
    submenu: [
      {
        label: 'Submenu 1',
        id: 'submenu-1'
      },
      {
        label: 'Submenu 2',
        id: 'submenu-2'
      }
    ]
  },
];

mf.addEventListener('menu-select', (event) => {
    console.log('Menu item selected:', event.detail.id);
});

To hide the menu toggle button use the following CSS:

math-field::part(menu-toggle) {
  display: none;
}

When the menu button is hidden, the context menu is still accessible with keyboard shortcut, right-click on long press.

To prevent the menu from being displayed in any case, set the mf.menuItems to an empty array:

mf.menuItems = [];

MathLive Context Menu

Filtering Menu Items

Replacing the Menu

Listening to Menu Events

Controling the Visibility ot the Menu