[Nautilus-list] View as <xxx> choices in regular menu bar

[John Sullivan <sullivan eazel com>]

I'd like to fix bug 3787 (no way to change "View as" choice if location bar
is hidden).

The only fix I have thought of is to put the "View as" choices in the View
menu somewhere. For reference, the View menu currently looks like this in
Icon view (the most complicated case):

     View
     -------------------
    | Refresh           |
    |-------------------|
    | Hide Sidebar      |
    | Hide Toolbar      |
    | Hide Location Bar |
    | Hide Status Bar   |
    |-------------------| ----------------------
    | Lay Out Items    >|| Manually             |
    | Clean Up by Name  ||----------------------|
    |-------------------|| By Name              |
    | Zoom In           || By Size              |
    | Zoom Out          || By Type              |
    | Normal Size       || By Modification Date |
     ------------------- | By Emblems           |
                         |----------------------|
                         | Tighter Layout       |
                         | Reversed Order       |
                          ----------------------

One possibility is just to add top-level menu items like this:

      View as Icons
    x View as List
      View as Music
    ------------------
      View as Other...

(x marks the current one -- it would be a standard menu checkmark.)

In theory, there might be many of these items, though so far in practice
there are never more than three.

Closer to the Macintosh style would be:

      as Icons
    x as List
      as Music
    --------------
      as Other...

The problem with this is that the components have localized text strings in
them. They have one text string for "View as List" (e.g.), and another for
just "List". But there is no text string for "as List", and just
constructing one by substituting "List" into "as %s" is not properly
localizable. (In fact, the reason we ended up with two localized strings is
because just substituting "List" into "View as %s" had localization
problems.)

A third possibility is to use a submenu, like:

                   -----------
    View as    > ||  Icons    |
                  |x List     |
                  |  Music    |
                  |-----------|
                  |  Other... |
                   -----------

This is not ideal for localization either, since we've already shown that
the phrase "View as xxx" can't just be substituted into. But it seems to
little old naive me that breaking it up into "View as" in one menu and "xxx"
in the other menu might make grammar issues a little more flexible?

I'd really like to hear opinions on (1) the localization issues; (2) which
of these proposals seems best for any reason; (3) where the item or items
should be inserted in the View menu; and (4) whether it's reasonable to
consider adding yet another oaf string to support the "as xxx" style.

John