Menus [was: Re: CVS access ]

[Jochem Huhmann <joh unidui uni-duisburg de>]

On Sat, 06 Jun 1998 21:40:03 EDT "Ben 'The Con Man' Kahn" wrote:

> 
> 	Alright.  Now I have time.  Can I get CVS access so I can try to
> implement tear off menus?  

Just an idea (and I will most probably not be able to contribute code
for it ;-): Since the gnome "politics" regarding window managers seems
to be the right thing (let the developers develop and the users choose
one), what about a gnome menu manager? 

If there would be a kind of protocol for communication between apps and
that mm (like the wm-hints for communication between apps and wm), the
whole menu-issue could be worked on seperately. If wm-developers wish to
integrate that into their wm (for per-window menu bars, for a global
menu bar like the mac or a floating menu panel like the NeXT or
WindowMaker), they could do so. If someone would like to write a
standalone app for that (maybe for speech input, or displaying menus on 
an
attached touch-screen or whatever) he could do that also. The user could
choose which to use then.

WindowMaker already supports such a protocol (it's somehow GNUstep 
related, AFAIK) - these days I run across a tiny extension for tcl/tk 
that allows programs written in tcl/tk to use the WindowMaker menus. It 
seems to me that something like this is the way to go, it would be much 
more flexible if applications don't have to draw menus (and toolbars) 
all by themselves.

Looking at the way WindowMaker handles this may be useful, for a 
tutorial
look at http://yoss.canweb.net/~frank/MakeWindow/


BTW: It seems the WindowMaker folks are putting a lot of effort into 
getting some kind of desktop together. At least the applets for the 
WindowMaker dock are really neat (much nicer than most of the applets 
for the gnome panel...). Have a look at http://windowmaker.mezaway.org/p
rograms.html


Sorry for posting words instead of code ;-)

	Jochem


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