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Is it possible in windows to toggle checkbox settings in menus without the menu closing down.

The application making me ask this question is Moo0 SystemMonitor, it got a context menu called Fields with a toggle for every possible field (all screen is not enough to show all). Going thru all these setting them as I want make the menu pop down at every selection. This of course make me loose track of the 'next' setting to check, every time.

Is it possible in plain Windows to get around this? Or are there any nice apps to make menus like this less of a pain?

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  • Yikes (Moo0) I see what you mean... nasty interface design.
    – pelms
    Jul 31, 2009 at 19:17
  • I fear it would be impossible to have an application interfere with the workings of all those other applications without running into nasty complications
    – Ivo Flipse
    Jul 31, 2009 at 19:29

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This is a bad UI design choice, for the very reasons you mention.

That said, it would be possible to build a dialog box in your favorite quick programming environment that uses SendKeys() behind the scenes to manipulate the menu. It is likely to be possible to discover the individual item ids and to send WM_COMMAND messages directly to the application to toggle individual items.

I don't know of a generic tool for such things, but there are several tools out there that are designed for building regression tests of GUI applications that can do this kind of thing. It is likely to be possible with VBScript and the Windows Script Host as well.

Note that making something that built the dialog for you by opening the menu and creating a checkbox per menu item would make maintenance easier, but will take more up front effort.

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