Re: [Texmacs-dev] Top level menus

[Joris van der Hoeven]

> > I continued thinking about how the reduce the number
> > of top level menus. Here are some thoughts.
> 
> I am not against the multiplication of the number of top level
> menus if they contribute to diminish the depth of them.

Too many top level menus is confusing for the user,
so we should avoid that. A good arbitrary limit is 12.

> > 1. Top level menus should not be dimmed but disappear
> >    when they are non relevant. This exception seems
> >    quite essential because of the wide variety of things
> >    which are potentially possible with TeXmacs.
> 
> 
> Probably, for dynamic items we don't want to dim, a rule of thumb is
> to segragate them to the end of a menu or a bar.

I basically agree with this (we use it in the case of icon bars),
but it is a problematic convention in the case of top level menus.
The dynamic items mostly concern insertion or formatting of structure
of a particular type (like Text, Mathematics, Table).

> So the first bar should be:
> 
> | static items | dynamic items          | help |
>                                         ^
>     a                                    -------- help at the very right

So the semantically natural layout would be

File | Edit | Insert | ... dynamic items ... | Document | ... etc ...

I fear that we will have to live with this.

> BTW: in Qt applis. it seems that if a bar does not fit because
> the window is not large enoguh, it is folded.

It is not because you can still access to the hundredth top level menu
that having hundred top level menus is good interface design...