There are a few different dropdown menu styles in Sketch today and it would be nice to unify them. This is for sure a low priority issue but it would be nice to see it polished.
Here are a few examples. Some are positioned a bit inconsistently, some have popover-style arrows etc.
The inconsistent positioning of menus we should definitely fix, but as you say it’d be quite low priority.
As for some having popover-style arrows but not others… well that’s because some of these are popovers, and some are menus. This is on purpose, because they’re quite different within macOS:
Menus: restrictive views, lists of (mostly) actions. Their use is transient: clicking within them will close the menu. You can type to go to a specific place. You can also activate them easily by mousing down → moving your cursor to the item → releasing the mouse to active. Toolbar buttons which show them have a chevron. You can navigate them with arrow keys.
Popovers: flexible views, and can show many different type of content, not just actions. You may click and take different actions within a popover, and it can remain open (but doesn’t have to). You may at times detach the popover so it stays open as you do other things: the new Comments popover works this way, for example.
You are right about menus vs. popvers. I kinda forgot about the nuances here, since I haven’t designed a Mac app for a long time. Thanks for taking time to explain!
