Re: [gtk-list] Re: Gtk look and feel

[John Sullivan <sullivan eazel com>]

leon@udmnet.ru wrote:

> Kent Schumacher wrote:
> >
> > The point about a sub-menu disappearing unless you follow an
> > exact path with your mouse needs to be addressed.  I don't think
> > this is a matter of taste.  I would assume any user would naturally
> > feel that they could move the mouse pointer directly to a sub-menu
> > item.
> >
>
> Sorry for long delay. This discussion seems closed, so the final
> word: as far as I remember, Mac from it's early days had two modes
> of menu popupping: it can pop up when you move mouse over submenu item
> in a menu and it can pop up when you click expicitly on a submenu item.
> In the latter case, submenu won't disappear until you click something
> else, notwithstanding where  your mouse is. I personally prefer the
> second style. It would be good to have them both, and have them
> themable.
>
> --
> Leon.

There seems to be a miscommunication here. I believe Kent is talking about
being able to move the mouse diagonally to a submenu item other than the
first, without the submenu vanishing when the pointer moves down across
another menu title. Leon, however, is talking about menus staying up
explicitly until the user clicks elsewhere, instead of the menu remaining open
only while the mouse button is down.

These are separate but somewhat related issues of menu behavior. Macintosh has
done the move-diagonally-to-submenu-item well since it introduced hierarchical
menus. Click-to-leave-menu-displayed first appeared on Macintosh much more
recently, I believe it was in MacOS 8. As others have pointed out, NeXT menus
had this second behavior before the Mac did.

I strongly agree with Kent that Gnome's current behavior makes it much harder
to select items from a submenu than it should be, and this behavior should be
considered a bug.

On the Macintosh (at least), click-to-leave-menu-displayed was merged into the
existing hold-mouse-button-down-to-view-menu behavior in such a way that both
still work nicely and don't get in each other's way. There's no need for a
preference to switch between them. I don't see any reason why this couldn't be
done on Gnome equally well.

John