Simple menu editor

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

Hi,
	I'm just about to import a very simple menu editor to gnome-menus based
on Calum's mockup some time ago:

  http://www.gnome.org/~calum/usability/specs/menu-edit/

	Build gnome-menus HEAD and run "gmenu-simple-editor" to try it out.

	This is pretty much the same as Christian's gnome-menu-editor, but with
less features. I thought it might good idea to try and explain why I
went with a new editor with less features :-)

  * First, this thing is supposed to be a simple menu editor which 
    allows user's to tweak their menus but doesn't screw things up so
    that e.g. newly installed packages don't show up or show up in 
    random places etc.

    A full featured "edit the system menus" editor for admins is also 
    planned.

  * Allowing the creation of new menus and entries leads to a slightly
    confusing interface where some menus and entries may be deleted and 
    others may not.

  * I'm not sure that creating a menu entry which points to a given 
    executable is really a common task for an average user. An 
    executable path is more an artifact of the terminal command line 
    than anything else. Note that we've also removed "Run Application"
    from the menus.

    The main use case for this feature is probably to allow a user to 
    create a menu entry for broken software which doesn't install 
    a .desktop file.

    (And yes, this implies the "Create new launcher" dialog is broken 
    too, but we know that already :-)

  * Allowing the dragging of menu entries between menus leads to a 
    confusing and inconsistant interface. The dnd operation is a "copy" 
    operation and you can't delete the copy.

    (You could perhaps implement it so the copy could be deleted, but 
    you'd again have the problem where some entries can be deleted and 
    others can't)

  * I can imagine that creating a "My Stuff" menu and putting the stuff 
    you use most often is fairly common. Perhaps we could "quick 
    launch" or "favourites" area in the editor where you could drag 
    items and the contents of that area would appear at the top of the 
    applications menu or something.

  * If you edit a menu item, the editor must create a copy of 
    the .desktop file in your homedir. If the package is then 
    uninstalled, or the icon/executable is renamed etc. you end up with 
    a duff menu item. The .desktop file is application data and its not 
    intended to be configurable (e.g. its in $(datadir))

    Perhaps that's something we could fix in the menu spec by allowing 
    the .menu file to override the name in the .desktop file.

  * I think the fact that you can select multiple items in the 
    directories list in gnome-menu-editor is pretty confusing and not 
    terribly useful. AFAIR Calum originally suggested it and then 
    recanted the idea after trying it out.

	At the same time, though, it is pretty cool that multiple menu editors
are being developed (gnome-menu-editor, the pyxdg one etc.) I'm all for
experimentation/choice here and the fact that all these are
interoperable just shows the value of the menu spec.

Cheers,
Mark.