Re: My Little Wish List for Gnome

[Ian Campbell <ijc25 cam ac uk>]

I had a similar idea to this as well, the main reason I dislike it is that
the system menu structure and contents are still being forced on the user,
for example if I wanted emacs in an "editors" menu instead of the
"applications" menu, or if I wanted to delete it completely, then merging
the two menus would be difficult (I think, not very tidy at least). But to
be honest I have no idea how the debian system works, so maybe they have a
way of doing it nicely...? 

However, I hadn't really intended for there to be two menus in use, what I
was really thinking of was the current system menu becoming more a
repository where users could see what applications were installed on the
system and choose the ones they wanted to include on their menu. (of
course they could still launch stuff from the system menu if they wanted) 
This way they get to choose exactly what appears and where it appears. 

Another option might be to remove the system menu entirely and expand
gmenu's add menu command to give the option of selecting from the list of
apps that the system knows is installed (ie the system menu), but I think
there are some advantages to keeping the system menu around, so I don't
really like this plan.

Cheers,
Ian

On Tue, 12 Jan 1999, Daniel Burrows wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 12, 1999 at 10:26:57PM +0000, Ian Campbell was heard to say:
> > 
> > I think a better way to allow the user's control over their menu is to
> > have the system menu as a sub-menu (similar to the way the redhat menu is
> > now) and the user menu as the main menu (I know this used to be
> > configurable, but I can't find the option anymore). Items on the system
> > menu would then have a right-click option 'add me to the main (user) 
> > menu'), and gmenu could allow something similar.  In this way the system
> > menu would remain as a list of available applications, and the user can
> > choose what he wants on his menu, add his own apps, and structure it how
> > he wants. Obviously a default user menu would be setup on the first time
> > gnome was started.
> > 
>   Is there any reason to have 2 menus?  I haven't delved into the menu system
> but I think the best way to handle this would be for Gnome to read menu
> entries from both the global directory (<prefix>/share/apps I think) and
> the user directory (~/.gnome/apps), then merge the two, so that you end
> up with one menu hierarchy containing both sets of menus.  Like in Debian
> I have most of the menufiles in /usr/lib/menu, but I can drop extra files
> into /etc/menu (and I believe ~/.menu but I haven't bothered with that) and
> they get merged into the menu system.
> 
>   Probably conflicts should be resolved by the user's setting overriding the
> system settings (I might want my Eterms running with --trans --shade even if the
> system menu runs them opaquely.)
> 
> -- 
>   Daniel Burrows
> 
>   Nothing is hopeless.
> 
>   PROOF:
> (a) Assume the opposite.
> (b) If something _is_ hopeless, then its condition can only improve.
> (c) If its condition can only improve, then there must be hope for it.
> (d) Therefore, nothing is hopeless.  QED.
> 
> 
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