RE: Menu customization

["Wesley Felter" <wesf cs utexas edu>]

> > What I was actually thinking is a little more generic.  Through
> > simple CLI, or more complex CORBA, "User" menu items could
> > conceivably operate on/with virtually any application or script. 
> > Here's a better example with the HTML editor.  You've finished
> > updating a web page in your favorite word processor.  You click
> > on "User->Web Publish" which FTP's the current document to your
> > remote web site.  This could be done with a shell script, or
> > through a CORBA link to your favorite FTP program.  Or a
> > combination of both, I guess.
> 
> 	Hey!  Good idea.  If there is a way to run a GNOME application
> through a TEXT BASED script, then that means we get all the advantages of
> years of research into CLI while still having a nice GUI!  Man...  Sounds
> like it'd be tricky to program...

Thanks to OSA and AppleEvents, we do this all the time on MacOS. Many applications have a Scripts menu that the user can add commands to; these commands are usually written in AppleScript or UserTalk. I'm not sure whether it is better to call it the User menu, the Scripts menu, or the Custom menu.

All you need is for all GNOME apps to expose their internal object models via CORBA; then the user can write Python/Perl/etc. scripts that manipulate applications. I doubt that it would be as easy as writing Frontier scripts on MacOS, but it's a start.

Wesley Felter - wesf@cs.utexas.edu - Hack the Planet