Re: Location of Desktop Preferences menu (was Reducing the number of special uris in gnome)

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Wed, Jul 03, 2002 at 10:14:03AM -0400, Bruce Robert Pocock wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-07-02 at 18:22, Andrew Sobala wrote:
> 
> > I agree with doing away with the preference submenus and launching
> > nautilus instead.
> > 
> 
> This is stolen from some program I once saw on OS/2, in the pre-Warp
> days...
> 
> When you pulled open the menu, it showed an option labeled (I think)
> "Settings;" the ellipsis ("submenu here" icon) was split off from it
> with a little vertical bar, rather like the pull-down "back" menu next
> to the "back" button in Nautilus/Galeon/...
> 
> Clicking on "Settings" brought up the set of all settings. Clicking on
> or mousing over the "submenu icon" pulled up a submenu.
> 
> Naive users don't have to pull open the submenu, they can get the whole
> shebang; but no extra clicks if you don't want to...

These are known as conditional cascading menus. There is an RFE of Gtk+ to
support these and also the MacOS -um- folder menu item. (I'm not sure what
it's called.)

The RFE:
  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=82162

A description linked to in the RFE:
  http://www.phys.lsu.edu/~merchan/CGMenus/Beta/index.html

(The index of the parent directory is the same thing.)

A conditional cascading menu would be inapproriate here because it is
supposed to be used when one of the items on the submenu is the default
among the others which are options. The MacOS thing would be correct here.
(I'm speaking of the appropriate use of these widgets, not whether using
 them is appropriate.)


Cheers,
Greg Merchan