[Usability] Re: Context Menus for Tabs in MDI Apps

["pborelli katamail com" <pborelli katamail com>]

Hi,

On Mon, 2004-03-29 at 23:09 +0100, Piers Cornwell wrote:
> It would be nice to get a consensus for whether or not to have context 
> menus for GNOME apps which use a tabbed MDI interface (principally 
> Epiphany and Gedit i think). Gedit currently has them, Epiphany hasn't.
> 
> 
I agree that it would be nice to get a consensus of this, especially, as Marco noted in bugzilla, in view of a common dock/mdi widget to be used for this kind of UI.
Since gedit is mentioned, let me note that we got feedback from users in gedit bugzilla about it (e.g. wrong focus etc) so the feature seems to be used at least by someone else beside me :-)
For what it's worth Mozilla has such a context menu too.

Personally, i think that it's quite "undiscoverable" (although if it was 
> a standard maybe it would be more obvious?) since "normal" tabs (like in 
> the Epiphany prefs dialog) don't have them. I also think that the tabs 
> should be just for clicking on to select them, with their functions 
> being held in the apps menu.
> 
> 
I don't agree about the non-discoverability point: the nice thing about context menu is that they are, as the name says, contextuals, so if I am looking for an action specific to a tab (the best example being detach the tab and move it to a new window) a right click menu on the tab label is the first thing I personally try.
I also don't agree about the "tabs in dialogs don't have a context menu" argument. Tabs in dialog are very different even if they are implemented using GtkNotebbok too: they cannot be detached, cannot be moved and cannot be closed... basically there are no actions to be performed on them beside clicking on them to select them.

A last point I would like to make is that I don't see how such a context menu would hurt: if the user right click on the tab it's because he is expecting a context menu, if he doesn't right click the menu will not get in his way.

If we decide that context menus are a good idea, perhaps we should also 
> choose which items to show.
> 
The item I'm more concerned about is "Move to new window" or "Detach" as epiphany calls it. Other items are IMHO application dependant, except maybe from "Close" but that would be probably redundant since we have a close button on the tab.

ciao
    Paolo