Menus

[John R Sheets <dusk smsi-roman com>]

gelderk@natlab.research.philips.com wrote:

> I meant, that the article favours configurability; part of the
> foot-discussion was about its start-menu look-alike-ing. If that is
> configurable, any user who does not like the foot (or its placement),
> can replace it with what he/she _does_ like.

(c:  Gotcha.  Couldn't tell where you were coming from....

The configurability angle did come up in the foot debates of yore.  It think it
was established that the user should be able to configure whether the foot menu
shows up as a foot icon (or some other icon), or as a text string ("GNOME",
"App", or whatever; no consensus on what exactly to call it).  I don't think
there was really any discussion about allowing the user to completely remove
the foot menu, i.e. merge it into the File menu.  I guess I hadn't really
thought of that before.

A lot of the debate focussed on whether or not we even needed a menu to the
left of the File menu, and how menu contents should be organized inside the
menus.  I don't think there was ever a consensus on this point.

Hmmm, you do suggest an interesting possibility: allowing the user to change
the ordering of his/her menus.  How much power should we allow here?  Should we
allow the user to totally (i.e. hopelessly) scramble his menus into any order
he chooses?  [The altered menu order would have to be saved in ~/.gnome, of
course.]  Is that more dangerous than helpful?  If so, should it be restricted
to reordering the top-level menus only?  Or should the menu items be fair game,
too?  Should we restrict menu item changes to a special menu (e.g. a "Tools" or
"User" menu?) that exists specifically for user control?

I dunno.  Most of this was kicked around months ago, but I don't think anything
was decided on.  I could be wrong.

John