Re: [Usability] any menu editor suggestions?



Hi Christian,

Great work! I really hope we can push this into GNOME soon.

> Note that things changed meanwhile: I've made pretty good progress at
> improving gnome-menu-editor. It displays application and menu icons, one
> can add menus and applications and copy apps between various menus. I've

We shouldn't have the feature of moving items between menus. Allowing
creation of new menus and allowing new launcher items to be created
there (or existing launchers to be copied), as long as the names were
tagged such that they'd never be confused with "upstream" menus (that
is, if we later add a menu item they won't have merge issues). My
motivation for pushing Mark toward simplified menu editing rather than
full-fledged was not because its easier to implement, but because it
has more consistent behavior. Also, it more directly targets the most
important use cases.

Allowing total-menu-customization is going to be desirable to some
people, but its sort of the equivalent of ricing up your car (lowering
its shocks, putting on a huge spoiler, a big ass split tailpipe,
painting it lime green, etc). People can still do it by editing the
vfolder files directly, but we its not really a core necessity.

Allowing moving of items between menus, for example, causes problems
with vfolder upgrades. You lose compatibility, menu items get lost or
moved, etc. Its better to have a system that always works than one
that deals with relatively fringe use cases.
 
> > I assume you are talking about my mail? :) Mmmm.. "sophisticated
> > functions"... well...
> >
> > 1. Displaying an icon to the left of the name (in the same column).
> >
> > You didn't seem to like this with the rationale that it brought to much
> > clutter? I don't know, personally I think icons helps users to associate
> > things. (Else, why do we have icons in the Applications menu at all?)
> 
> Right, as I stated above, this is supported now.
> 
> > 2. My second concern is third party apps a user downloads from the net
> > that can be run from whichever directory it is extracted to (which is,
> > imho, how apps like these should work; just download an archive, extract
> > it somewhere, open folder, click icon). How do you get that application
> > to show up in the menu?
> 
> Hrm gnome-menu-editor now allows to drag binaries and scripts to the
> application section (if only one menu is selected). A dialog pops up
> with name and executable pre-filled, where the name is the basepath of
> the exec path. Works and feels neat, actually :).

Sounds good, just make sure that the "auto created" entries can't get
confused with future .desktop files. For example, you should probably
prefix the file names with something
"userdefined-gedit-3829798.desktop" or whatever.
 
> > My initial proposal was to make it possible to drop executbles/desktop
> > files in the window and remove the entry when the executable is removed.
> 
> So you think it is a good idea to not display an entry whenever the
> binary specified by the "Exec" field is not available? Doesn't sound
> very practicable, really.

AFAIK, the panel menus themselves do this already. If a binary is not
existant, the .desktop item doesn't show up.

As a minor quibble, I would disable allowing multiple selection in the
left hand menu. Its not really necessary, and it could be confusing.
Lets keep this thing dead simple and focus on making sure it never
breaks (no matter how the desktop/distro upgrades the system vfolder
definitions, what apps get installed / uninstalled, etc).

-Seth



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