Re: My GWorkspace feature request

[Stefan Böhringer]

I second the need for context menus.
I second your design idea.

Stefan

On Mon, 2003-06-16 at 05:53, Eric Christopherson wrote:
[..]
> I still haven't talked about the idea I have for context menus. Now bear
> with me; this is just an idea I've had, and I realize some issues would have
> to be worked out for it to apply to GNUstep.
> 
> It goes as follows. Each application would have a "special" menu in its
> menubar/application menu. I'm not sure what I would call it, but possible
> names I've thought of are Object, Item, or Context. Anyway, this menu would
> contain actions that deal with whatever object is selected -- be it a file,
> a widget in Gorm, a text selection, a mail message, or whatever. The menu
> would be shown in both the menubar/main menu *and* the transient menu (that
> thing that pops up by default when you hold the right button in Open/
> GNUstep).
> 
> The entries in the special menu would change depending on what object is
> selected (using the word "selected" very loosely; it might just mean the
> mouse pointer is over it). So you would only get actions which make sense in
> the current context. The problem that I can see with this, unfortunately, is
> that things (such as menus) that change tend to give usability junkies fits.
> 
> The remaining feature of my menu design would be that when the user presses
> the right button, the *whole* transient application menu should show up,
> *plus* the context menu, thus allowing the user easy access to either
> application-global actions or context-specific ones, while still separating
> them spatially.
> 
> The way I envision it, the context menu would be positioned such that its
> title cell is directly underneath the mouse pointer, just as the
> application menu now starts with its title under the pointer. The
> application menu would be positioned just to the left of it, such that the
> title cell of the context menu is positioned just to the right of its
> corresponding entry in the app menu. Thus it would look just the same as
> first opening up the app menu and then mousing down to the "Context" entry
> (or whatever name it takes), thus popping open the context submenu; except
> that the submenu would start up already open.
> 
> Well, I've gone on long enough. Let me know what you think. Like I said, I'm
> not sure how well my menu idea would fit GNUstep, but I've been curious what
> others might think of it.