Top-Bar-Organizer/docs/About_the_Top_(Menu)Bar.md

About the Top (Menu)Bar

First of all, here are some Gnome Shell Design references for the top (menu)bar:

• https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/Design (see: Components -> Top Bar)
• https://people.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-20091114.pdf (see: Components -> Top Menubar)

The top bar is an instance of Panel.
The Panel class is defined in panel.js and you can find an annotated version of panel.js in the panel.js of this repo.

Initialization of the Top Bar

The top bar gets initialized by Panel._init() and Panel._update(). These functions basically make sure, that the top bar has a Panel._leftBox, Panel._centerBox and Panel._rightBox with the default items like activities, appMenu and so on.

Adding Items to the Top Bar

Extensions can add new items to the top bar using Panel.addToStatusArea().