Re: [desktop] why kde and gnome's menu situation sucks
Richard Braakman wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 23, 2002 at 12:00:23PM -0400, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> > That's true, but it's useful to have a semi-exhaustive list of the
> > interactive programs on your computer available. I think every program
> > should supply menu information (as today), and groups that want to make
> > certain software not available (in the menu) by default can install
> > override information.
>
> Hmm, I guess that even a simple menu can have a "Everything" label
> under which a user can find everything, if needed. Not everything
> flat, but a deeply nested menu tree like we have today. It would
> be rarely used, but available when needed. That way you get to
> keep both features.
This seems unnecessary to me. The menu has everything, organized to
hopefully make it reasonably easy to find something even if I don't
remember its name, and I put icons for frequently-used programs on a
gnome-panel, dock app, or similar one-click quick-launch facility. This
makes sense to me, because I want one-click access to my favorite
programs, which means I don't want to have to pull down a menu to get to
them. So why does the apps menu have to serve as both an index of all
available tools AND a favorite-apps list?
By comparison, Windows XP's Start menu has a list of most-recently-used
apps as well as the Programs sub-menu that lists everything. But I
hardly ever use the MRU part, because I keep icons for my commonly-used
apps in the QuickLaunch part of the task bar, where I can get to them
more quickly.
It seems to me that if the menu contains everything, it's doing its job.
Perhaps what we really need is some standardized tools for setting up
one-click launchers under various window managers/desktop environments.
Moving something from the gnome menu to the panel is easy enough, but
it's still a manual operation; configuring dock apps is a bit trickier
for the less-technical user, since it usually involves editing a config
file, the syntax for which could be almost any conceivable format. If
there were a simple, scriptable tool that could take a specified menu
entry and put it in a launcher's config file (presumably via an
interface similar to what the Debian menu system already uses for
setting up menus for different window managers), then it would be easy
for an admin to write a script to set up a company-standard launcher
panel/dock app for every machine under his control.
Craig
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