make menuconfig is one of five similar tools that can assist a user in configuring the Linux kernel before building, a necessary step needed to compile the source code.

Despite being a simple design, make menuconfig offers considerable advantages to the question-and-answer-based configuration tool make config, the most notable being a basic search system and the ability to load and save files with filenames different from ".config".

make menuconfig allows navigation forwards or backwards directly between features, rather than make config's approach of listing every single option one by one, which requires pressing the ↵ Enter key repeatedly to view all options.

Instead of editing the .config by hand, make menuconfig shows the descriptions of each feature (by pressing the "Help" button while on a menu option), and adds some (primitive in version 2.6.31.1) dependency checking.

The help information is distributed throughout the kernel source tree in the various files called Kconfig.