Remove menubar from Electron app

Question

You can use w.setMenu(null) or set frame: false (this also removes buttons for close, minimize and maximize options) on your window. See setMenu() or BrowserWindow(). Also check this thread

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Electron now has win.removeMenu() (added in v5.0.0), to remove application menus instead of using win.setMenu(null).

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Electron 7.1.x seems to have a bug where win.removeMenu() doesn't work. The only workaround is to use Menu.setApplicationMenu(null), however, this will disable all the menu shortcuts like F11 for toggling fullscreen etc.

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In new versions of Electron, you can set autoHideMenuBar: true while creating browserWindow, pressing Alt will show the menu bar again.

const mainWindow = new BrowserWindow({
  autoHideMenuBar: true,
})

Use this:

mainWindow = new BrowserWindow({width: 640, height: 360})
mainWindow.setMenuBarVisibility(false)

Reference: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/1415

I tried mainWindow.setMenu(null), but it didn't work.

For Electron 7.1.1, you can use this:

const {app, BrowserWindow, Menu} = require('electron')
Menu.setApplicationMenu(false)

The menu can be hidden or auto-hidden (like in Slack or VS Code - you can press Alt to show/hide the menu).

Relevant methods:

---- win.setMenu(menu) - Sets the menu as the window’s menu bar, setting it to null will remove the menu bar. (This will remove the menu completly)

mainWindow.setMenu(null)

---- win.setAutoHideMenuBar(hide) - Sets whether the window menu bar should hide itself automatically. Once set the menu bar will only
show when users press the single Alt key.

mainWindow.setAutoHideMenuBar(true)

Source: https://github.com/Automattic/simplenote-electron/issues/293

There is also the method for making a frameless window as shown bellow:

(no close button no anything. Can be what we want (better design))

const { BrowserWindow } = require('electron')
let win = new BrowserWindow({ width: 800, height: 600, frame: false })
win.show()

https://electronjs.org/docs/api/browser-window#winremovemenu-linux-windows

doc: https://electronjs.org/docs/api/frameless-window

Edit: (new)

win.removeMenu() Linux Windows Remove the window's menu bar.

https://electronjs.org/docs/api/browser-window#winremovemenu-linux-windows

Added win.removeMenu() to remove application menus instead of using win.setMenu(null)

That is added from v5 as per:

https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/16570

https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/16657

Electron v7 bug

For Electron 7.1.1 use Menu.setApplicationMenu instead of win.removeMenu()

as per this thread:
https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/16521

And the big note is: you have to call it before creating the BrowserWindow! Or it will not work!

const {app, BrowserWindow, Menu} = require('electron')

Menu.setApplicationMenu(null);

const browserWindow = new BrowserWindow({/*...*/});

UPDATE (Setting autoHideMenuBar on BrowserWindow construction)

As by @kcpr comment! We can set the property and many on the constructor

That's available on the latest stable version of electron by now which is 8.3!
But too in old versions i checked for v1, v2, v3, v4!
It's there in all versions!

As per this link
https://github.com/electron/electron/blob/1-3-x/docs/api/browser-window.md

And for the v8.3
https://github.com/electron/electron/blob/v8.3.0/docs/api/browser-window.md#new-browserwindowoptions

The doc link
https://www.electronjs.org/docs/api/browser-window#new-browserwindowoptions

From the doc for the option:

autoHideMenuBar Boolean (optional) - Auto hide the menu bar unless the Alt key is pressed. Default is false.

Here a snippet to illustrate it:

let browserWindow = new BrowserWindow({
    width: 800,
    height: 600,
    autoHideMenuBar: true // <<< here
})

When you package your app the default menu won't be there anymore, if this is bugging you during development then you can call setMenu(null) on the browser window as suggested by @TonyVincent.