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

[Joey Hess <joey@kite.ml.org>]

Susan G. Kleinmann:
> 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.)  

This is exactly the point of the menu system. It's very painful to keep
your fvwm menus in sync with what's actually installed on your system. The
menus automate this.

Of course, you don't have to use the menus if you don't want to. But your
packages should still support them.

> 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.)  

This is debatable, but anyhow, you don't have to use icons either, and can
still use the menus. Or you can have a sorted list of descriptions with icons 
too.

> 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.

Well sure. But menus are invaluable if you don't know what programs are
installed on the system, especially for new users. There are a lot of
commands that arn't typically used in pipes, such as mail programs, web
browsers, games, editors, paint programs, etc. It's useful to have such
programs on the menus.

-- 
#!/usr/bin/perl -i\$q='$q',\$p='$p';eval\$q.\$\^I\n"#  #   joey@kite.ml.org
$q='print"$p$^I\n',$p='#!/usr/bin/perl -i';eval$q.$^I  #          Joey Hess
                      "He. He. He." - - Herman Toothrot