Re: menus ....

[Alexandre Fayolle <alf logilab com>]

This is not a technical reply but rather a user interface designe
consideration.

On Tue, 12 Sep 2000 JParker coinstar com wrote:
> G'Day !
>
> I am building an application that has a menu structure that is several layers
> deep in sub menus.  

This is generally not a good idea in terms of ergonomy. More than one
submenu makes the user interface very awkward to use (for instance, have
you tried to play in XEmacs with Options->Customize->Emacs->...): it
difficult to remember the path for a given menu item, and if you've got to
access several different items in the same sub-sub-sub-...-menu, things
get tedious. 

Some ways to get around this are:
 
 * using popup menus
 * changing the main menubar dynamically to provide top level menus that
match the needs
 * providing configurable toolbars
 * providing a command area, for instance using a GtkNotebook, and buttons

Of course it depends on what you where intending to put in your
submenus. I'd suggest you thought carefully about it, though, since it is
the kind of design choices that can change your application from something
userfriendly to some horrible and unusable monster.



-- 
Alexandre Fayolle
http://www.logilab.com - "Mais où est donc Ornicar ?" - 
LOGILAB, Paris (France).