tiptap comes very raw, but that’s a good thing. You have full control (and when we say full, we mean full) about the appearance of it. That also means you can (and have to) build a menu on your own. You can start with a few buttons, and we help you to wire everything up.
## Menus
The editor provides a fluent API to trigger commands and add active states. You can use any markup you like. To make the positioning of line menus easier, we provide a few utilities and components. Let’s go through the most typical use cases one by one.
### Fixed menu
A fixed menu, for example on top of the editor, can be anything. We don’t provide such menu. Just add a `<div>` with a few `<button>`s. How those buttons can trigger [commands](/api/commands) is [explained below](#actions).
### Bubble menu
The [bubble menu](/api/extensions/bubble-menu) appears when selecting text. Markup and styling is totally up to you.
It’s not an official extension yet, but [there’s an experiment you can use to add what we call slash commands](/experiments/commands). It’ll allow you to start a new line with `/` and will bring up a popup to select which node should be added.
Okay, you’ve got your menu. But how do you wire things up?
### Commands
Let’s assume you’ve got the editor running already and you want to add your first button. You’ll need a `<button>` HTML tag with a click handler. Depending on your setup, that can look like the following example:
2.`chain()` is used to tell the editor you want to execute multiple commands,
3.`focus()` sets the focus back to the editor,
4.`toggleBold()` marks the selected text bold, or removes the bold mark from the text selection if it’s already applied and
5.`run()` will execute the chain.
In other words: This will be a typical **Bold** button for your text editor.
Which commands are available depends on what extensions you have registered with the editor. Most extensions come with a `set…()`, `unset…()` and `toggle…()` command. Read the extension documentation to see what’s actually available or just surf through your code editor’s autocomplete.
### Keep the focus
You have seen the `focus()` command in the above example already. When you click on the button, the browser focuses that DOM element and the editor loses focus. It’s likely you want to add `focus()` to all your menu buttons, so the writing flow of your users isn’t interrupted.
### The active state
The editor provides an `isActive()` method to check if something is applied to the selected text already. In Vue.js you can toggle a CSS class with help of that function like that:
This toggles the `.is-active` class accordingly and works for nodes and marks. You can even check for specific attributes, here is an example with the [`Highlight`](/api/marks/highlight) mark, that ignores different attributes:
```js
editor.isActive('highlight')
```
And an example that compares the given attribute(s):
You can even ignore nodes and marks, but check for the attributes only. Here is an example with the [`TextAlign`](/api/extensions/text-align) extension:
```js
editor.isActive({ textAlign: 'right' })
```
If your selection spans multiple nodes or marks, or only part of the selection has a mark, `isActive()` will return `false` and indicate nothing is active. This is how it is supposed to be, because it allows people to apply a new node or mark to that selection right-away.
## User experience
When designing a great user experience you should consider a few things.
### Accessibility
* Make sure users can navigate the menu with their keyboard
* Use proper [title attributes](https://developer.mozilla.org/de/docs/Web/HTML/Global_attributes/title)
* Use proper [aria attributes](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Accessibility/WAI-ARIA_basics)
This section needs some work. Do you know what else needs to be taken into account when building an editor menu? Let us know on [GitHub](https://github.com/ueberdosis/tiptap) or send us an email to [humans@tiptap.dev](mailto:humans@tiptap.dev)!
Most editor menus use icons for their buttons. In some of our demos, we use the open source icon set [Remix Icon](https://remixicon.com/), that’s free to use. But it’s totally up to you what you use. Here are a few icon sets you can consider:
