Re: "Desktop preferences" as a top-level item

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Havoc said:

...

> Anyway, I want to see us start from the top down. We are basically out
> of space in the Preferences menu. Do we add submenus and end up like
> the KDE prefs menu or the GNOME 1.x menu of old?
> 
> If not we need to think this through.
> 
> Just adding a Theme Set control panel will give us these
> appearance-related control panels:
> 
>  - Background
>  - Font           (we should rename this Fonts btw)
>  - Theme          (includes toolkit - WM - icon)
>  - Theme Set      (includes both Background and Fonts in the set, not
>                    just themes)

This looks a little less idiotic if we replace "Theme" with "GTK+ Theme"
as was suggested elsewhere.  That may argue for splitting out the WM
theming and FreeDesktop.org-style icon sets into separate capplets,
however.  Alternatively, we could call the "Theme Set" capplet's menu
entry (assuming for example Preferences->Desktop as the first two
levels)

Preferences -> Desktop -> General
			  Background
			  Fonts
			  GTK+  Theme
			  ...

<aside>
It seems that this is about grouping.  The simplest grouping from the
bottom-up perspective is to have more-or-less module-centric items (i.e.
window manager, gtk+, fonts, background, etc.) but that is probably an
artifact of the developer's viewpoint rather than representative of how
(non-hacker) users see things.  I agree that a better grouping might
combine GTK+, WM, and desktop-icon themes into one capplet (with
separate controls, of course) as has been suggested elsewhere, though I
think the "meta-themer"/Theme Set capplet would reduce the need for such
grouping.
</aside>

I think that the cause of the discomfort is not just the naming, it's
having a "general" appearance-changing-thingy at the same level of
hierarchy as the "specific" appearance-changing-thingies.  The question
is, which is better/worse, having general and specific items share a
level, or adding another level?  Personally I think reducing the depth
is worth the small incongruity, and using a label like "General" to
describe the simple one-click "Theme Set" UI (which by the way could
still use the phrase "Theme Set" in its presentation) might help.

> 
> In this setup we're still missing one possibly important panel, namely
> Colors where you can just change colors (overriding the theme
> presumably). [1] 

Hmm, why would we do this when we are suggesting combining WM appearance
and GTK+ theme into the same capplet?  It's not clear to me that this
level of control is really warranted in our menus... I think if we split
Colors out from GTK+ Theme, we'd need to do some additional refactoring
as well.  Having General (aka Theme Set) and GTK+-Theme *and* Colors
seems over-redundant even to me ;-)  

regards,

Bill

> I believe that having both Theme and Theme Set, with Theme Set
> actually grouping Background and Fonts in addition to Theme, makes
> little sense. So I'm opposed to just adding a Theme Set control panel
> without reworking the big picture.
> 
> How to rework?
> 
> Havoc
> 
> [1] Note that Colors is a similar problem to theme set (where a WM or
> toolkit theme is a set of colors, plus an engine/style, and you can
> customize the colors).  Having Color Sets nested inside Themes nested
> inside Theme Sets is probably too complex an overall setup.

There's no guarantee that a given gtk-engine will even pay attention to
colors, is there?  So I don't know how this would work in the "general
case".