Hi, I am really new to plugin stuff with Sublime. I am wanting to create some new menu items, but the menus will have quite a few things in them and I wanted to arrange some of them in multiple columns with vertical separators rather than one long list using horizontal separators.
Is this possible?
Thank you!
You can, like this:
{
"caption": "Menu 1",
"id": "menu_1",
"children": [
{
"caption":"sub-menu 1",
"command":"sub_menu"
}
]
}
Multi-column layouts in menus are not a thing on the OS level, and Sublime definitely has nothing like that.
From a UX perspective I would suggest going leveraging progressive disclosure by using sub-menu’s as proposed by @gepd. This helps uses find the item they need by association, instead being confronted by and having to deal with all options at once.
Thanks guys. We use a very old version of HTML Kit right now that supports a lot of interesting plugin stuff, and we have made a lot of menu items that look like the following:
That is a drop down menu we get to by clicking the little arrow on the side of the menu button. So not only can you click the menu button to get a default behavior, but you can click the little drop down next to it to get a big multicolumn menu. It’s really handy.
Problem is, we are wanting to move to using newer software, but have not found anything that gives us many of the things we rely on as far as plugin support.
Thank you for the information though. I appreciate it.
The Sublime Text approach to presenting lots of options is generally to use the quick panel since it allows you to use the keyboard to quickly filter to what you are looking for.
Granted, it does require you have some idea of what you are looking for.
Makes sense. We might just have to get used to the idea of doing things a little different than we have been for the last 15 years 
We do have LOTS of menu items though. There is a crap ton of snippets we use. We have been looking into Notepad++ and Atom as well but still cannot quite find what we want. Must have been something specific to HTML Kit if the OS itself doesn’t support it as was mentioned.
I can imagine with the new HTML-ish popups in Sublime (and the mdpopups library), you should be able to create a plugin with a big popup with lots of buttons. I don’t think there is anything that will give you this out of the box. Most new editors (Brackets, Atom, VS Code) all followed Sublime in exposing commands via a command palette / quick panel.
… as it allows working without mouse or searching overloaded and deep stacked main menus.
The time of deep stacked main menu layouts from the early 90’s is over now.
