ADR-0108: The editor has a context menu built from the Edit menu's table

• Status: Accepted; amended by ADR-0121, ADR-0143
• Date: 2026-09-12
• Deciders: jka
• Decision: D108

Context

Right-clicking the text did nothing, although the panes and tabs had context menus. The actions needed (clipboard, undo, select all, find) already existed as shared procedures.

Decision

The editor gets a right-click context menu containing the Edit menu's actions and the find commands. It applies to the editor only; read-only views (agent log, compare panes, git diff, manual) are a later change.

• One table for both menus. editor_menu_items returns the Edit actions as {label command accel state}. The menubar's Edit menu and the context menu are both built from it, and the Edit menu recomputes enabled states each time it is posted.
• Only states rio can compute are greyed. Cut and Copy follow the selection; Select All follows an empty buffer. Undo and Redo stay enabled, because the history is in the core and there is no query for it. Paste stays enabled, because probing the clipboard is a blocking X request to whichever application owns the selection.
• The click prepares the target. A click inside the selection keeps it; a click elsewhere clears it and moves the caret to the clicked character, so Paste lands there. The click also focuses its editor group, because Tk moves focus only on button 1 and every command acts on the focused group.
• Find entries. The label reads Search for "needle" for a usable single-line selection (shortened after 20 characters) and Search… otherwise, matching what the commands actually seed.
• The binding is on the widget, ahead of the editing-mode tag, and ends with break, so it wins over any mode. The Menu key and Shift+F10 open the same menu at the caret.

Consequences

• The menubar and the context menu cannot drift apart.
• The items docs/editor.md lists are checked against the real menu in both directions (ADR-0117).