ListMenu JavaFX Control

While working on an upcoming JavaFX Framework for Kotlin — TornadoFX, I needed a HTML5 like menu for a demo application. I thought it would be easy to reuse existing components like a VBox with ToggleButtons in it, but there were a lot of corner cases involved in making it behave like an actual menu.

Instead I opted to create a reusable component for web-like menus with configurable orientation and icon position. I also wanted to solve another problem I ran into with the ToggleButton approach — not all icons, especially in icon fonts — are the same width. This makes it quite difficult to align the button text in relation to the other buttons. I therefore added a custom css property called -fx-graphic-fixed-size to deal with icons of different width or height, depending on the orientation of the menu.

There is also an active pseudo state to distinguish the active menu item visually. You can listen to the menu's active property to react on changes.

You can find it in my TornadoFX Controls repo on GitHub, and in Maven central:

<dependency>
    <groupId>no.tornado</groupId>
    <artifactId>tornadofx-controls</artifactId>
    <version>1.0</version>
</dependency>

For now there is only this single control in there, but I plan to add more in the future.