Swift: `NSMenuItem` title not showing

July 27, 2023

If for some reason you’re making a Swift app and want to programmatically define your menu items, as opposed to using Xcode’s storyboards to create them visually, you may run into an issue where your menu title is not showing.

Let’s consider the following example (e.g. put it in test.swift and run it with swift test.swift):

import Cocoa

class AppDelegate: NSObject, NSApplicationDelegate {
  func applicationDidFinishLaunching(_ notification: Notification) {
    let app = NSApplication.shared
    app.activate(ignoringOtherApps: true)

    let mainMenu = NSMenu()
    app.mainMenu = mainMenu

    let appMenu = NSMenuItem()
    mainMenu.addItem(appMenu)

    let editMenu = NSMenuItem(title: "Edit", action: nil, keyEquivalent: "")
    mainMenu.addItem(editMenu)

    let editSubmenu = NSMenu()

    editSubmenu.addItem(withTitle: "Test", action: nil, keyEquivalent: "")
    editMenu.submenu = editSubmenu
  }
}

let app = NSApplication.shared
let delegate = AppDelegate()

app.setActivationPolicy(.regular)
app.delegate = delegate
app.run()

When we run it, the edit menu doesn’t show. Or actually, it’s there but its text is blank!

This is because the NSMenuItem title actually doesn’t matter here. It’s the title of the NSMenu that we use as a submenu that matters.

Let’s fix it up:

-let editMenu = NSMenuItem(title: "Edit", action: nil, keyEquivalent: "")
+let editMenu = NSMenuItem(title: "Doesn't matter", action: nil, keyEquivalent: "")
 mainMenu.addItem(editMenu)

-let editSubmenu = NSMenu()
+let editSubmenu = NSMenu(title: "Edit")

And now our title shows up properly!

In the example above, note that it was also important to explicitly add an app menu before our edit menu:

let appMenu = NSMenuItem()
mainMenu.addItem(appMenu)

This is important, because the first item of the main menu is gonna be treated as the app menu. If we didn’t do that, our edit menu would actually become the app menu, so that Test would appear under swift-frontend, and Edit would be nowhere to be seen.

Swift: `NSMenuItem` title not showing

A note about the app menu

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