Re: Tear-off menus, version 2

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Fri, 2003-07-04 at 14:16, Michael Toomim wrote:

[ Not commenting on the rest of the ideas ]

> 3. The user wants to change a bunch of boolean settings in the "View"
> menu of her web browser.  (I'll use safari's View menu here because I
> happen to be writing this on a mac.)  The safari View menu looks like this:
> 
>   _______________________
> |  View                 |
> |-----------------------|
> |  Show                 |
> |X   Address Bar        |
> |X     Back / Forward   |
> |      Home             |
> |      Autofill         |
> |      Text Size        |
> |X     Stop/Reload      |
> |      Add Bookmark     |
> |X     Google Search    |
> |      Bug              |
> |                       |
> |X   Bookmark Bar       |
> |X   Status Bar         |
> |                       |
> |  Stop                 |
> |  Reload Page          |
> |  Make Text Bigger     |
> |  Make Text Smaller    |
> |                       |
> |  View Source          |
> |  Text Encoding ->     |
>   -----------------------
> 
> It's currently very hard to change more than one of these at a time,
> because the menu disappears after every click, causing the user to lose
> her place visually, and then to have to move her mouse cursor back up to
> "View" and then down again to the next menu-item of interest for each
> setting she wishes to toggle.  This is especially a problem when the
> user is trying to configure her toolbars on a large scale, since that
> tends to be a task of experimentation and trial-and-error where she
> would tend to select many different items multiple times, to try turning
> them on and off.

Keyboard space does what you are asking for here for control-click for
check/radio menu items. So, move your hand from the small control key to
the big space bar and you are all set. 

I'd be a bit worried that leaving up the menu with the keyboard/pointer
grab would cause problems for normal menu items.... we've spent some
effort to make sure that the menu is unposted and ungrabbed before we
call the callback.

(Maybe supporting control click or shift click as well would make sense.
I don't know)

Regards,
						Owen