Re: Menu Guidelines

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

I like Calum's comment on Close document-name and Quit app-name.
This can usefully be extended to undo operation, redo operation.

I personally have real problems with control-W as close window or exit,
because it's also used to delete a word (e.g. in text fields, in vi's
insert mode, in the Unix shell), so I sometimes delete Mozilla windows
by mistake.

So it should be possible to override the default keybindings, not just on
a per-application basis but on a per-user and per-enterprise basis,
as you can with Motif (and open look) applications.

I'd also like to see standard menu items to save and erstore the current
workspace (i.e. the set of all open windows and states).  This is
needed for "save session" in any case, so it's not a lot of extra
work for the programmer.

A couple of other comments:
> What about the concept of "Repeat" (which is basically "keep redo-ing,
> but to my new selection", as supported by M$ Word etc.), is this
> useful/widespread enough to be worth providing a guideline for?

vi has something like this (the "." command) and I think that it is
very worth making Unix features prominent.  Sun keyboards used to
have an Again key on them.

On the Help menu...

I see no justification for "about zkrws 4" not telling you anything
about what the program does or is used for.  If you were interviewing
people for a job and said, tell me about yourself, you would not
expect candidates to start talking about their parents and how and
where they were conceived :-)

By all means have a button or submenu to give info on the developers,
the company, the licence, the release notes, but please make "about"
tell you about the program :-)  I don't care that there's a strong
convention amongst commercial applications to have an advert here.

> Personally, I'd also like to see a "Search Help" menu item by default,
yes.

Best,

Lee
-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam holoweb net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001