Menus

[Biju Chacko]

On Tue, 28 Jan 2003 08:34:00 +0100, Jasper Huijsmans wrote:

> I feel your pain. This all seems like a terrible kludge. If only these
> people could agree on something it would at least not be a wasted
> effort to implement it.

Somewhere along the line, I forgot to mention that the main motive for
the plugin system would be to postpone development of the freedesktop
menu spec parser, until such time as it settles down.


> A library with plugins, now there's someting new :) But I don't think
> the panel and the taskbar should use this menu, really. Plugins to
> generate different types of menus are of course perfectly alright.

At least one person on the list (Collins Richey?) wanted to access the
menu from the panel. With a menu popup and the panel clock put on the
taskbar, we could emulate the windows/kde/gnome/icewm look. (ewwww ...
yuck :-) ). For that matter, if we could switch off the panel popups,
vertical mode would give us a reasonable facsimile of WindowMaker.

The basic point is that *we* really shouldn't be deciding how the end
users use XFce. We ought to give them tools to configure it to their
greatest comfort.

In short, we should be able to put the menu on the panel and taskbar.
Those who like it can use it, those who don't can disable it.

> Nice, but perhaps unnecessarily complex. I think having the plugins
> only provide a get_menu() function and have a separate menu editing
> app will be a lot easier to implement.

Perhaps. Personally, I dislike menu editing apps. Makes menu editing a
seperate task. when it usually is a sub-ytask of some other job you are
doing.

> The easiest solution perhaps would be to copy the xfce3 behaviour and
> have our own simple menu (something like xfdeskmenu) that is editable
> and have other menus as an add-on. For simplicity we could just ignore
> user modified gnome and kde menus, since they would bring the real
> complexity of the VFolder spec. 

That was my second option. Unfortunately, my gut feeling is that this
would be a dead end and difficult to extend.

> At least I feel the multiple editable menus solution is overly
> complicated. We should decide either to just use the VFolder spec and
> use the GNOME/KDE menu or we have a simple editable menu of our own
> with non-editable GNOME/KDE/DEBIAN menu.
> 
> This is not easy to decide. I'll think about it some more. Don't know
> if that will do any good though ... :)

Hmmmm ... you've given me some ideas, IAC. Let *me* also think about it.

-- b

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Biju 'botsie' Chacko                        biju_chacko at vsnl dot net
http://www.symonds.net/~botsie          Public Key available on request
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