[Menu] Add ability to disable the 'focus' on hover behaviour

[sebinsua]

Feature request

Summary

My workplace has the need for a Menu containing a <Menu.Item> holding a (mui) <TextField> that is auto-focused. When using base-ui as soon as you move the mouse into the menu (even if by accident), it immediately moves the 'focus' onto a menu item, and so my text field loses its focus.

I notice that it's possible to pass in extra options into useListNavigation here but I don't think this is exposed via base-ui. Am I looking for focusItemOnHover={false} to be added or is there another way to do this? Ideally, I'd like more control over this in general.

Motivation

Menus in our app often serve multiple purposes. They are not only menus but also used as quick entries or forms. This means you can do everything via one menu and it's fast. To be clear, there might be some similarities between what I'm suggesting and something like a combobox, but really what we have are like rapid-fire forms within dropdown menus.

[mj12albert]

Ariakit allows configuring this on the MenuItem level: https://ariakit.org/reference/menu-item#focusonhover

really what we have are like rapid-fire forms within dropdown menus

Maybe Popover is better for this use-case than Menu though? I wonder if having a text box inside Menu would cause other problems, e.g. with typeahead

(Also IIRC the menuitem role doesn't allow interactive children)

[sebinsua]

Maybe Popover is better for this use-case than Menu though?

You might be right that it could be a Popover but visually what I have looks like a right-click menu. Kind of annoying to have to write it completely from scratch just because of the one non-standard item.

Right now I've done something kind of terrible: I wrote a <FocusTrap> component.

I agree that this request is kind of edge-casey and you should be careful about how broadly you allow configurability at the public API. I kind of wish we had something like a context provider for some of these options like focusItemOnHover that @floating-ui has, either as part of @base-ui or provided by @floating-ui itself.

[mj12albert]

This ensures keyboard focus and pointer usage are synchronized together (which is how native menus work in macOS). Otherwise the hover style and focus style lead to duplication when mixing the input modalities.

From #1591 (comment), this is the reason why focus on hover is the default