Actions are organised into groups. An action group is essentially a map from names to Gtk.Action objects.

All actions that would make sense to use in a particular context should be in a single group. Multiple action groups may be used for a particular user interface. In fact, it is expected that most nontrivial applications will make use of multiple groups. For example, in an application that can edit multiple documents, one group holding global actions (e.g. quit, about, new), and one group per document holding actions that act on that document (eg. save, cut/copy/paste, etc). Each window's menus would be constructed from a combination of two action groups.

Accelerators are handled by the Gtk accelerator map. All actions are assigned an accelerator path (which normally has the form <Actions>/group-name/action-name) and a shortcut is associated with this accelerator path. All menuitems and toolitems take on this accelerator path. The Gtk accelerator map code makes sure that the correct shortcut is displayed next to the menu item.