Question

Is there a simple way to increase the spacing between the menu item text and its shortcut key in a WinForms MenuStrip? As seen below, even the default template generated by VS looks bad, with the text “Print Preview” extending beyond the shortcut keys of other items:

I’m looking for a way to have some spacing between the longest menu item and the start of the shortcut key margin.

Answer 1

An easy way to do it is to space out the shorter menu items. For example, pad the Text property of your “New” menu item to be “New               ” so that it has all the extra spaces at the end and that will push over the shortcut.

Update

I suggested automating this in code to help you out. Here’s the result of letting the code do the work for you:

I wrote the following code that you can call that will go through all the main menu items under your menu strip and resize all the menu items:

// put in your ctor or OnLoad
// Note: the actual name of your MenuStrip may be different than mine
// go through each of the main menu items
foreach (var item in menuStrip1.Items)
{
    if (item is ToolStripMenuItem)
    {
        ToolStripMenuItem menuItem = (ToolStripMenuItem)item;
        ResizeMenuItems(menuItem.DropDownItems);
    }
}

And these are the methods that do the work:

private void ResizeMenuItems(ToolStripItemCollection items)
{
    // find the menu item that has the longest width 
    int max = 0;
    foreach (var item in items)
    {
        // only look at menu items and ignore seperators, etc.
        if (item is ToolStripMenuItem)
        {
            ToolStripMenuItem menuItem = (ToolStripMenuItem)item;
            // get the size of the menu item text
            Size sz = TextRenderer.MeasureText(menuItem.Text, menuItem.Font);
            // keep the longest string
            max = sz.Width > max ? sz.Width : max;
        }
    }

    // go through the menu items and make them about the same length
    foreach (var item in items)
    {
        if (item is ToolStripMenuItem)
        {
            ToolStripMenuItem menuItem = (ToolStripMenuItem)item;
            menuItem.Text = PadStringToLength(menuItem.Text, menuItem.Font, max);
        }
    }
}

private string PadStringToLength(string source, Font font, int width)
{
    // keep padding the right with spaces until we reach the proper length
    string newText = source;
    while (TextRenderer.MeasureText(newText, font).Width < width)
    {
        newText = newText.PadRight(newText.Length + 1);
    }
    return newText;
}