Quote Originally Posted by ovidiucucu View Post
If you want full-screen functionality as implemented in most applications, that's it: in full screen-view you have to remove caption as well as the menu bar.
[...snip...]
Further, to keep some functionality provided by the menu or the title bar buttons when in full-screen view mode, you can use accelerators and/or context menus.
Thanks for trying, but I've got all of that done and working already (if that wasn't clear, I apologize.) But accelerators are not the same as menu hot-keys. An accelerator is a single key or chord (e.g. 'F' or 'Ctrl+Alt+F') but a menu hot-key sequence is, well, a sequence of individual keys (e.g. 'Alt', 'V', 'T', 'M', in sequence to toggle menu visibility in Firefox.) There may be an accelerator associated with a sequence, but they are absolutely NOT equivalent, because the sequences can act as a mnemonic to help the user to remember things, which is why they are often used in training programs.

Since the existing menu code in Windows already knows how to process those sequence for me, I'm trying not to lose that functionality AND to avoid recreating that entire portion of the menu system myself, just to get back something that already exists because Microsoft has wrongly decided that an invisible menu has no value.

My best work-around to Microsoft's oversight is to activate and show the menu when the mouse approaches the top edge of the display. I'm hoping to improve that by also activating the menu when the 'Alt' key is pressed, but I need to ensure that it is also processed by the menu and I need to figure out when to hide/remove the menu again. It seems that there is no good way to do this, which is why I asked -- just in case someone had discovered a secret or little known Windows function or option that allowed a menu to be invisible or even just to be draw zero or one pixel high.