Re: GtkMenu and cursor change

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

"Gene Z. Ragan" <gzr ix netcom com> writes:

> List comrades,
> 
> Is there a good usability reason that GtkMenu replaces the standard mouse
> pointer with a slightly larger, mirrored cursor?
> I realize that GTK has historical roots as a free replacement of Motif and
> this is the way that Motif treated the cursor when the user selected a menu
> and moved the mouse over it. Is there a strong usability reason for
> retaining this feature?  

Actually, GTK+-1.0 didn't have this feature - I added it for GTK+-1.2
because I noticed Netscape doing it and thought it was sort of neat.
As I recall now, the points that appealed to me were:

 - Doesn't obscure the menu items

 - Informs the user that they are in "menu selection mode" - since
   the behavior while selecting a menu is quite different than
   other 

I assume that Motif does it for the same reasons.

> No other modern windowing toolkit changes the mouse
> cursor during a menu operation.  This includes Windows, MacOS, OSX and BeOS.
> There are real usability reason for not changing the shape of the mouse
> cursor during a menu selection operation.

Which are? 

[ I'm not denying it, but they aren't obvious to me; my only guess
  is that users might get confused by the cursor "jumping", though
  the hotspot stays in the same place. ]

Regards,
                                        Owen