One of Sonar's many appealing features is that you can customise almost anything, including colours, menus and how plug-ins are accessed. It might seem as though these are options intended for people with too much time on their hands, but customisation can really speed up projects by making the program fit with how you work. There are more options than we've got room for in a single article, so here are some of the most common — and useful — ones.

When it comes to user interfaces, I find that the fewer distractions I have to deal with, the better. Being able to edit menus in Sonar means that you can slim them down by eliminating options you never use. It's possible to customise the contextual (right-click) menus as well as the application main menu.

To edit menus, go Options / Menu Editor. The upper left area is where you load and save menu layouts, and just below that is where you can choose the menu you want to edit. A pane to the right of the Menu Editor window shows the existing setup. Menu-bar headings have a '+' sign; if you click on this the items under that heading are revealed.

The primary means of editing is to drag and drop menu items into different orders, or even different menus. There are also four basic menu-editing functions:

Create or remove submenus (good for organising particular commands). There's a shortcut for placing numerous items in a submenu: shift-click on the items, then click on Create New under Submenus.

Click on menu items to hide or show them. If a menu contains hidden items, you can still access them by clicking on the arrows that appear towards the bottom of the menu.

Insert or remove a separator (line) that appears between menu items, by right-clicking on any item in the right-hand pane and choosing Insert Separator or Remove Separator.