On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 13:57, Nick Treleaven nick.treleaven@btinternet.com wrote:
On Thu, 16 Sep 2010 09:54:09 +1000 Lex Trotman elextr@gmail.com wrote:
- let the user pick say four most used top level commands since we
are *never* going to agree on them. Use a simplified version of the customise toolbar dialog.
Personally I don't think it's worth doing this. Put the most useful things at toplevel, everything else in submenus.
Ah but whats the most useful?
Things which are useful for the largest number of users. There is also an issue of letting new users discover some useful things easily that they might not know Geany does.
I *never* use insert comments from the popup and rarely from the menu (changelog mostly) so for me having any insert comments in the popup is a waste of space.
Which is why a single Insert submenu would be better.
I'm not suggesting its required, but if someone out there has the time to implement it this would remove all the disagreements :-)
Is it so bad to solve the disagreements using submenus?
This avoids maintenance and code complexity of popup configurability, which I predict isn't going to be pretty. C is not a good GUI language.
Where I really see an advantage of having the context menu customisable are plugin actions. With my gproject plugin and my not-publicly-released ctags plugin I also added several items at the top of the context menu (plus separators). I can imagine that if several plugins do a similar thing, the context menu gets pretty messy (someone will put the new items to the top, someone to the bottom, someone will use separators, someone not, ...) Also the menu starts growing even if the user doesn't really use the context menu item of the given plugin.
This is why I really like the Lex's idea of having a fixed set of items in the menu that are always present (possibly containing submenus) and a variable set of configurable items. If the configurable items can be arbitrary items from the keybindings list, the plugins won't have to add their own items into the context menu and the user can only pick those he wishes to be present. It's not necessary to have submenus in the customisable part of the menu - a plain list of items would be fine. By default the variable list could also contain the "questionable" entries that someone wishes to be present in the menu and someone not. Those who don't want to have them can just remove them if they wish.
Of course this would require some work...
Jiri