Re: menus (was Re: proposal for limiting menu icons color and size)

["Susan G. Kleinmann" <sgk@kleinmann.com>]

Joes Hess had said:
> because Christian Schwarz said:
> > What's the status of the menu system, i.e. how many packages support it?
> > I just had a look at the goal list for 1.3: the menu support is on this
> > list! Can we reach that goal?
> 
> I don't think we can make it, but we can come close. A possible FAQ in 1.3 
> will be "why is package foo not on the menus?". I count 54 packages on my 
> system with menus. Most everything I need is on the menus now, but some 
> important packages (like xbase) don't list all their programs on the menus 
> yet.

I'm one of the troglodytes that hasn't implemented menus in my packages yet.
I looked briefly at the information on the menu system that I could find,
and I couldn't figure out what the purpose of the menu system actually was.
As a user, I don't want anyone or any program "adjusting" my fvwm2 menus; 
they were painful enough to set up in the first place (I find fvwm2 much 
clumsier than fvwm in this respect.)  

WRT icons, I don't use any, with the exception of the FVWM pager, for 
lots of reasons.  One is that one can't sort icons alphabetically; 
therefore it becomes inefficient to put many icons on the screen 
(it is much quicker to find a word in an alphabetically sorted list 
than a picture in a necessarily unsorted list.)  

I also make little use of the menus that I have set up.  I just find 
menus too limiting.  They have the same drawbacks as GUI's in general:  
you can't arbitrarily string programs together in pipes, which to me 
is one of the major advantages of a system that comes with a command 
input screen and a powerful shell.

I'm bringing all this up now because I'm working on the FAQ, and must
admit that if someone were to ask me the question you posed above,
I'd be stumped.  

What am I missing?

Susan Kleinmann