The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]

• Developer: Karl Hsu / Product Page
  
• Price: Free

I first heard about this app over on the Forum site a week or so ago, and it's quickly become a key utility on my home machine. What does it do? Very simply, DejaMenu will create the frontmost application's menubar as a pop-up menu at the mouse's current location, as seen at left being used in Safari. If you have multiple monitors, or even just one large screen, this can be a great timesaver -- moving your mouse from the bottom right corner to the top left corner of a dual-monitor setup can be a real drag, so to speak. With DejaMenu, the menu is but one keyboard combo away at all times, regardless of your mouse's position.

The first thing I really like about DejaMenu is that it's an application. It's not a preference pane, or any sort of low-level extension to the system. So I have no fears about it crashing my machine or my applications when in use (and I haven't had a single crash since installing it, so it seems quite stable). When you launch it for the first time, it asks you to assign a keystroke sequence to activate the pop-up menu. Make sure you pick one that's not in use by another application (and you'll need to have "Enable access for assistive devices" enabled in your Universal Access preferences panel). This is where DejaMenu became a 9 instead of a 10 -- I wasn't able to use the Control key in my keystroke combo, which somewhat limits the available choices.

Once assigned, DejaMenu is now running, and you'll have a menubar pop-up in every application (well, probably not in Classic!). If you double-click DejaMenu in the Finder again by accident, you'll get a pop-up menu over DejaMenu with three choices -- Configure, Help, and Quit. Choose Configure to assign a new hot key, Help for help, and Quit, well, you get the idea. DejaMenu runs without a dock icon or menubar icon, so this is the way to quit the program if you ever wish to do so.

The real power of DejaMenu, though, comes into play with a multi-button mouse. I assigned the seldom-used right-side button on my Microsoft five-button mouse to send the DejaMenu activation keystroke. So now I have one-click no-keyboard access to the menubar, regardless of where I happen to have the mouse on the screen. DejaMenu is a great freeware app (as is Karl's XShelf, a prior Pick of the Week selection).