Re: On deprecating GtkTearOffMenuItem

[jcupitt gmail com]

On 26 May 2010 20:25, Paul Tan <pt75234 aim com> wrote:
> For those who care or use "menu/submenu tear-off feature"
> (GtkTearOffMenuItem), please read:
>  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=602882
>
> this issue.  We would also like to hear from other GTK+ developers/
> Application-developers/users on their usages of GtkTearOffMenuItem,

My application, nip2, uses tearoff menus and my users tell me they like them.

nip2 is a GUI for an image processing library and has to present the
300 or so operations in the library to the user. Additionally, the app
includes it's own programming language which the user can use to
create more operations. In total, nip2 has about 600 operations
available by default. These operations are best represented to the
user as text strings, something like "4-connected dilate", for
example.

These operations are presented in four ways:

* The canonical representation is as a hierarchy, organised by
function. This is presented as a large set of nested menus, up to 4
menus deep in cases I think, with tearoffs. This is an easy way to
find something if you know roughly what you are looking for (all the
morphological operators are appear together, for example). Tearoffs
are handy if you want to repeatedly use functionally related
operations and don't want to drill down 4 levels of menus each time.

* A second set of menus present the operations organised by task. For
example, all the operations you might find useful during image
acquisition are grouped together. Again, tearoffs can save a lot of
clicks.

* A pull-out browser shows the operations as a flat list of operation
name and operator tooltip text. There's a search box that lets you
filter the operations to make it a bit more manageable. This is a good
way to find things if you only have a vague idea what you want, but it
takes up a huge amount of space.

* ... and you can type equations, like "sobel A2", but I'm probably
about the only user of the program who does this, heh. You can also
bind keystrokes to operations, which can be very convenient.

http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk

John