Re: [Texmacs-dev] Reorganization of the menubar

[David Allouche]

On Wed, Jul 24, 2002 at 01:20:40PM +0200, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
>
> I also checked several editors and browsers and you seem to be right.
> I probably should make it something like
> 
>       File Edit View Insert Text Paragraph Document Go Tools Settings Help

Let us consider two browsers which are renowed for the quality of
their GUI: Konqueror and Galeon. If we mimic their layout we can get:

  Galeon style:

    File Edit View Settings Go Insert Text Paragraph Document Tools Help

  Konqueror style:

    File Edit View Go Tools Settings Insert Text Paragraph Document Help

I tend to prefer the second layout. For one thing, I think the "View"
and "Go" menus should not be far away from each other since they are
semantically close.

For the "Tools" and "Settings" menu, the problem is a bit more
complicated, even Konqueror and Galeon do not seem to agree.

I think the second layout is better. There is an argument of semantic
closeness. "File", "View", and "Settings" all control global state of
the application, so they belong together (and Galeon agrees on that
point). The last problem is "Tools" which basically reads "stuff which
did not fit anywhere else". I would prefer it at the start simply
because it contains important commands and putting it at the far end
may cause it to be overlooked.

Following that reflexion, the layout should be something like the
Konqueror-like layout (which I prefer), or maybe with the Settings and
Tools menus swapped, like this:

    File Edit View Go Settings Tools Insert Text Paragraph Document Help


> By the way, what about changing "Go" into "Browse"?

I think that would be a very bad idea. "Go" is conventional (user know
what it means, esp. at the beginning of the menubar) and easily
translatable. But "Browse" is hard to translate; even in French, do
you know a good translation for "Browse"? I do not.

> > Additionnally, I think the menubar items spacing should be increased
> > by about 25 or 50%. I find it difficult to make out the different
> > items since anti-aliasing tend to make the typographic grey of the
> > menubar more uniform.
> 
> I am not sure. One also has to be careful that everything
> still fits on an 800 x 600 screen in all foreign languages.

Right... A better toolkit would give us an extensible menubar (à la
KDE) but right now, that can be problematic.

-- 

                             -- David --