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How to show a context menu

Paul Hudson @twostraws October 17th 2019

Fully updated for Xcode 11.4

SwiftUI gives us the ContextMenu modifier for creating popup menus in our apps. In iOS this is usually triggered using 3D Touch, but it works just the same as a right-click on macOS – it’s a flexible API.

A context menu is built from a collection of buttons, each with their own action, text, and icon. The text and icon can be provided directly inside the button, because SwiftUI will provide an implicit HStack to make sure they fit the system standard look and feel.

So, if we wanted a context menu to be attached to some text, we could provide two buttons for the menu like this:

struct ContentView: View {
    var body: some View {
        Text("Options")
            .contextMenu {
                Button(action: {
                    // change country setting
                }) {
                    Text("Choose Country")
                    Image(systemName: "globe")
                }

                Button(action: {
                    // enable geolocation
                }) {
                    Text("Detect Location")
                    Image(systemName: "location.circle")
                }
            }
    }
}

To try that out on iOS, press hard/long on the “Options” text to bring up the menu, or right-click on macOS. It’s worth adding that you can attach these sorts of menus to any SwiftUI views, not just text views.

Note: Right now context menus are a little buggy, and you might find your app crashes with an error claiming that the context menu was invalid.