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Menu: Revealing adjacent submenus should be instant #85116
Description
Currently there's a short animation to show/hide submenus which works well. However the animation plays every time a submenu is shown/hidden which makes navigating adjacent submenus feel slower than it should. You can feel this tension in the editor options menu:
Screen.Recording.2026-10-19.at.16.12.20.mov
Once a submenu is open, if the next action (cursor/focus) would reveal another submenu then the previous submenu should hide instantly, and the new submenu should appear instantly.
Activity
prasadkarmalkar commentedon Oct 20, 2026
I looked into this. The
@wordpress/uiMenu is built on@base-ui/react, and Base UI decides when to adddata-instant, the attribute our CSS uses to skip the animation. Right now it only does that when switching between menus in a menubar, not between sibling submenus, so every switch plays the full fade.Base UI already has an open issue for exactly this: mui/base-ui#2442. Once it's fixed there, we'd only need to update
@base-ui/react. Otherwise, we'd need a workaround in Gutenberg for now.Let me know if a workaround in Gutenberg is the way to go for now. Happy to start on a plan for it.