Faster foot menu access

[Haukur Hreinsson <hawk gagarin is>]

I read http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html the
other day and after calling the author a conceited Mac elitist a couple
of times, I had to admit that he had some very good points. Especially
about how big things are easy to hit and anything that's on the edge of
the screen is infinitely big.

I would like to see an option (not necessarily the default but hey, why
not?) of making panel contents reach all the way to the edge of the
screen so that I may, for example, sling the cursor recklessly to the
bottom left corner, click, and hit the foot menu.

Now, granted, this doesn't help those with edge flip (unless they're on
the bottom left virtual desktop (or maybe if they have some edge
resistance)), but I think quick access to controls along the edges and
in the corners is reason enough to abandon edge flip. (Actually, what I
really want is selective edge flip (flip only if some modifier is
active) but that's a window manager thing.)

Does the list agree that modifying the panel in this way would be
beneficial? Does somebody want to implement this? Should I shut up and
code it myself? Is it hard to do for some nonobvious reason?

Another thing we talked about a long time ago is the Mac-style menubar.
A menu at the top of the screen is a nice big target and can be accessed
more quickly than one at the top of the current window. Before
experiencing it for myself, I would have said the distance to the
menubar was a bigger factor but I've had the mixed pleasure of working
on a Mac recently and the shared menu bar is one of the things I like. I
might be willing to give up pointer focus or sloppy focus in exchange
for a Mac-style menu bar but if I recall correctly, there were other
reasons than focus for why we couldn't have that in Gnome.

Actually, it's coming back to me. The biggest reason was consistency
with non-Gnome apps, I think. The rest were technical issues which,
while perhaps a bit hairy, must be solvable. Does anybody else want a
shared menu bar, even despite the consistency issue?

I gotta get some sleep. Sorry for rambling on and please don't feel that
I'm demanding or expecting anything of the Gnome developers except
perhaps a bit of dialogue.