Re: none

[Miles Bader]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 09:56:55PM +0800, Sacha Chua wrote:
> Right now I'm studying textmenu and tmm, trying to figure out what
> kind of a menu system I really want. I guess most people don't think
> tmm is broken (it's actually quite nice), but I wonder if it can be
> improved.

I think tmm is `broken' too, because:

(1) It operates differently from other menus so it's bound to confuse
    beginners.

(2) Even once I got used to it a bit, I still found it very awkward to use:

    (a) Moving between menus and sub-menus (it just replaces the contents of
        the `menu buffer') is way too heavy-weight. A typical drop-down menu
        implementation allows you to quickly scan through submenus seeing
        what's there, while also preserving all the `parent context' for you
        to see.

    (b) The arrangement of menu items in the buffer seems often hard to read
        quickly.

    (c) I find the way the user-input (in the minibuffer) works annoying.  I
        don't really like using completion when choosing from a small set of
        displayed items (because doing so requires me to stop and think about
        which key to type corresponds to which displayed), I'd rather just
        select directly from the list.  You can scroll through the list in
        the minibuffer using direction keys, but the `disconnected' nature of
        it makes this awkward; it would be _much_ better to just manipulate a
        cursor in the displayed list directly (you can do this sort of by
        switching to the menu-window, but (1) that's an irritating extra step
        you have to take, and (2) moving between menu-items once you're there
        is still slow and clumsy [e.g., the huge initial comment that has to
        be skipped, the double-column arrangement of items]

    [I imagine that if you're using emacs-speak, BTW, you might disagree about
    some of this]

(3) It's ugly as hell.   Bleah.

-Miles
-- 
Occam's razor split hairs so well, I bought the whole argument!