UI elements and interactions

Sphinx provides three different roles for the documentation of the user interface and its interactions: guilabel, kbd and menuselection:

Input

Output

Annotations

:guilabel:`Cancel`

Cancel

Any label used in the user interface can be labelled with this role, including the labels of buttons, window titles, field, menu and menu selection names and values in selection lists.

:guilabel:`&Cancel`

Cancel

Keyboard shortcuts for GUI labelling can be inserted with an et character (&); this leads to underlining of the following letter in the output.

Note

If you want to insert an et character, you can simply double it.

:kbd:`Ctrl-s`

Ctrl-s

This represents a sequence of keystrokes. The form of the key sequence may depend on platform or application-specific conventions. The names of modifier keys should be written out in full to improve accessibility. Keyboard labelling should be referenced.

:menuselection:`File --> Save`

File ‣ Save

A menu selection is labelled with the menuselection role. This marks the complete sequence, including the selection of submenus, specific operations or any sub-sequences. The names of the individual selections are separated by -->.

Like guilabel, menuselection supports keyboard shortcuts with an et character (&).