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

[Gustavo Joćo Alves Marques Carneiro <ee96090 fe up pt>]

	What GTK menus need is a timeout. When the pointer enters a menu
(item), its submenu shouldn't popup before a certain period of time. This
way, when moving the mouse over many menu items to reach another one, the
submenus in between don't popup.
	This problem shows up in the GNOME menus with the little icon
images activated. It takes some time to show a menu (in my P133,48MB). I'm
willing to tolerate that delay but, when several menus have to be
displayed to reach the top one (applications), it gets really slow and
annoying. 
	Of course, the timeout would also solve the diagonal moving of the
pointer (unless the user moves it very slowly).

On Tue, 23 Nov 1999, John Sullivan wrote:

> 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
> 
> 

-- 
Gustavo J.A.M. Carneiro
World::Portugal::FEUP::DEEC::LEEC::TEC
[reinolinux.fe.up.pt/~ee96090]