[Mac-only] Remove "Start Dictation" and "Special characters" from window menu

[felicienfrancois]

We should be able to remove thoose menu items.
Its seems to be added in all cases to the second window menu item, whatever its name.

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[tommoor]

The "Edit" menu? These are OSX standard, removing dictation in particular would be an accessibility barrier - I'd be interested to know the reasoning?

[felicienfrancois]

First thoose menu items are not necessarily in the Edit menu (the edit menu can be disabled with the hideEdit option).
Its are appended in all cases to the second menu whatever it is (so it may be a non sense to have it in this menu).

Secondly, unlike other native menus its are not translated in the local language.

Thirdly, unlike other native menus, they are not changeable / overridable because they cannot be seen through nw api. So it is impossible to adapt the availability of the feature or the way it work depending on the context.

Then, depending on the app it may be misleading for the user (Especially when there are no text inputs). It could also be an issue for code editors because dictation does not work well for code and it is not recommanded to use Apple special characters :-)

[Montoya]

Any update on this? I'm running into this issue over a year later...

[ghostoy]

@Montoya @felicienfrancois I made a PR #5132 which updates the menu items under Edit menu when setting menubar for your app. Then you can iterate the items and decide whether to remove the items or not. A new property of nw.MenuItem called native is a boolean to indicate whether they are added by native system.

For example,

var menu = new nw.Menu({type:'menubar'});
menu.createMacBuiltin('myapp');
nw.Window.get().menu = menu;

// iterate the items under Edit
var editMenu = menu.items[1].submenu;
editMenu.items.forEach((item, i)=>{
  // remove all native items
  if (item.native) editMenu.remove(item);
});

If you want to keep just one, item.label will tell you the name of the item. Keep the one you want and remove the others. In my test, the automatically added items are actually localized, which is different from @felicienfrancois 's investigation. There is no way to tell the translated names for them AFAIK. So be careful when testing the names of the items if you just want to keep one.