wxGUI Toolboxes - GRASS Manual
Author: GRASS Development Team
Description: wxGUI Toolboxes: GRASS Reference Manual

## wxGUI Toolboxes

## KEYWORDS

general, GUI

## DESCRIPTION

The Toolboxes is a way to customize items in wxGUI menu. Toolboxes enable to:

- hide unused menu items in menu (e.g. Imagery, Database) or submenu (e.g. Wildfire modeling)
- change order of menu items and subitems
- add new menu items (e.g. Temporal)
- add addons modules
- add your own modules

Toolboxes are configured through two XML files (`main_menu.xml` and `toolboxes.xml`) located in your user home GRASS directory, subdirectory `toolboxes` (`$HOME/.grass8/toolboxes/` on UNIX). Currently, there is no GUI front-end for toolboxes, however only simple editing of text files is needed.

### Brief description of file `main_menu.xml`

This file represents the main menu (File, Settings, Raster, ...). By modifying this file you show and hide menu items which are represented by `subtoolbox` tag.

Tag `user-toolboxes-list` is interpreted as a menu containing a list of all user-defined toolboxes. If not needed it can be removed.

Following lines can be copied to `.grass8/toolboxes/main_menu.xml` and by removing, adding or reordering lines users can change the main menu items. See further examples.

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <toolbox name="MyMainMenu">
      <label>Default GRASS main menu bar</label>
      <items>
        <subtoolbox name="File"/>
        <subtoolbox name="Settings"/>
        <subtoolbox name="Raster"/>
        <subtoolbox name="Vector"/>
        <subtoolbox name="Imagery"/>
        <subtoolbox name="Volumes"/>
        <subtoolbox name="Database"/>
        <user-toolboxes-list />
        <subtoolbox name="Help"/>
      </items>
    </toolbox>

### Brief description of file `toolboxes.xml`

This file contains structure and description of individual toolboxes. Note that both Raster and e.g. Query raster maps are individual toolboxes although one contains the other. Tag `toolbox` contains `subtoolbox` tags which are defined later in the file. These nested toolboxes are linked through `name` attribute.

Apart from `subtoolbox` tag, tag `toolbox` can contain individual items (modules) and separators (for visual separation in the menu tree).

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <toolboxes>
      <toolbox name="Raster">
        <label>&amp;Raster</label>
        <items>
          <subtoolbox name="DevelopRasterMap"/>
          <subtoolbox name="ManageRasterColors"/>
          <subtoolbox name="QueryRasterMaps"/>
          <subtoolbox name="RasterMapTypeConversions"/>
          <separator/>
          <module-item name="r.buffer">
            <label>Buffer rasters</label>
          </module-item>
          ...
          ...
      <toolbox name="QueryRasterMaps">
        <label>Query raster maps</label>
        <items>
          <module-item name="r.what">
            <label>Query values by coordinates</label>
          </module-item>
          <module-item name="r.what.color">
            <label>Query colors by value</label>
          </module-item>
        </items>
      </toolbox>

To redefine a toolbox (or use it as a template), copy specific part of file `grass7/gui/wxpython/xml/toolboxes.xml` from GRASS installation to a new file in user home (`.grass8/toolboxes/toolboxes.xml`) and edit it. Rename this new toolbox.

## EXAMPLES

### Hiding menu items

If we are for example working only with raster data, we can hide menu items Vector and Database. The file `main_menu.xml` then contains the following lines where we omitted the two toolboxes:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <toolbox name="CustomizedMainMenu">
      <label>Default GRASS main menu bar</label>
      <items>
        <subtoolbox name="File"/>
        <subtoolbox name="Settings"/>
        <subtoolbox name="Raster"/>
        <subtoolbox name="Imagery"/>
        <subtoolbox name="Volumes"/>
        <user-toolboxes-list />
        <subtoolbox name="Help"/>
      </items>
    </toolbox>

### Creating custom toolbox

In this example we create a new toolbox Favorites containing existing GRASS module and toolbox, custom module created by the user and addon module. The `toolboxes.xml` file contains following lines:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <toolboxes>
      <toolbox name="MyFavorites">
        <label>&amp;Favorites</label>
        <items>
          <module-item name="g.region">
            <label>Set region</label>
          </module-item>
          <module-item name="r.mask">
            <label>Mask</label>
          </module-item>
          <separator/>
          <module-item name="m.myown">
            <label>Do my own stuff</label>
          </module-item>
          <module-item name="i.histo.match">
            <label>Calculate histogram matching</label>
          </module-item>
          <subtoolbox name="RasterReportsAndStatistics"/>
        </items>
      </toolbox>
    </toolboxes>

Optionally, we can add this toolbox to the main menu items. The `main_menu.xml` file contains following lines:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <toolbox name="CustomizedMainMenu">
      <label>Default GRASS main menu bar</label>
      <items>
        <subtoolbox name="File"/>
        <subtoolbox name="Settings"/>
        <subtoolbox name="Raster"/>
        <subtoolbox name="Vector"/>
        <subtoolbox name="Imagery"/>
        <subtoolbox name="Volumes"/>
        <subtoolbox name="Database"/>
        <user-toolboxes-list />
        <subtoolbox name="Favorites"/>
        <subtoolbox name="Help"/>
      </items>
    </toolbox>

If we have `user-toolboxes-list` tag in the `main_menu.xml` file, our custom toolbox will be listed in the automatically added Toolboxes main menu item. The screenshot shows the resulting menu:

## NOTES

After the first start of wxGUI with custom toolboxes, `.grass/toolboxes` directory will contain file `menudata.xml` which is auto-generated and should not be edited.

## SEE ALSO

wxGUI, wxGUI components

## AUTHORS

Anna Petrasova, OSGeoREL, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague
Vaclav Petras, OSGeoREL, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague

## SOURCE CODE

Available at: wxGUI Toolboxes source code (history)

Latest change: Thursday Feb 12 09:11:33 2026 in commit: 48172e28111bad429d8470aca9d646a563cb3e5a

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