opinion on some new prefs

[Brian J. Tarricone]

hi all-

i was thinking about the 'Menu' tab of the new desktop preferences, and 
rehashing what someone mentioned about possibly moving it elsewhere, 
since perhaps it doesn't really "go" all too well.

i realised that some of the prefs i was thinking of may be bordering on 
pref-bloat, and i thought i'd run them by here for opinions.

* configurable mouse buttons
a few people in #xfce wished they could map the window list and/or the 
desktop menu to mouse buttons other than the default.  this isn't a big 
deal, and doesn't involve much overhead, so i was thinking about 
implementing it.  however, it occurs to me that the mouse button setting 
is a pretty arbitrary decision, and given a pretty short amount of time, 
i don't see why anyone can't get used to our default layout. 
furthermore, it's a consistency issue.  if random guy A sits down at a 
workstation that has xfce4 on it (assume he's familiar with xfce4), he 
probably expects right-click to open the desktop menu and middle click 
to open the window list menu.  if someone has configured it in another 
way, random guy A will be confused, and for really no reason.  but - to 
play devil's advocate again - i guess it's possible that a user might 
have an actual reason to remap the buttons.  maybe they have a hand 
injury, and it's awkward for them to press the middle button, and they 
only use the window list and not the desktop menu.  they might want to 
put the window list on the right mouse button.  i'm sure this is a
minority of users, but i think it's a perfectly valid case.

* disabling icons
currently, you can disable icons in the desktop menu via an attribute in 
the menu.xml file.  i'm not really thrilled with that solution for a 
couple reasons.  if the user <include>s another menu file, and the 
'showicons' attribute contradicts the parent's 'showicons' attribute, 
what do you do?  there are a few approaches, each equally valid.  also, 
the default is to show icons.  if the user wants to hide icons, and has 
<include>'d  other menu files, they have to edit each menu file.  also 
there's the issue of the autogenerated system menu.  right now it 
inherits the 'showicons' attribute from its parent menu file, for lack 
of a better thing to do.  so to make this clearer, i'd just like a 
global menu pref.  i haven't decided if this will truly be global - 
i.e., if you disable them in the desktop settings, should the menu panel 
plugin be affected?  or should the panel plugin have its own icon 
disabling pref?  in addition, the window list menu could have a pref to 
show or hide window icons (really old machines, perhaps?).

* disabling the menu(s) entirely
some people, like moritz, don't want the desktop menu at all.  there's a 
configure-time option to disable compilation of the menu module, but, if 
you're dealing with binary packages from your distro, the only way to 
truly disable the menu is to go into $libdir/xfce4/modules and remove 
the shared lib for the menu.  and then you get an annoying g_warning() 
printout at startup (not too big a deal).  so i think a pref to disable 
the desktop menu is a must.  also, the user might want to disable the 
window list menu.  this code currently resides in xfdesktop, so you 
don't really get any memory savings there (and the code is so small, 
it's pretty silly to move it to a shared lib), but the ability to 
disable it might be a nice thing to have.

so here we have the prefs, somewhat ascii-gui-like:

[x] enable window list menu
    [ window list mouse button ]
    [x] show icons in window list menu

[x] enable desktop menu
    [ desktop menu mouse button ]
    [x] show icons in desktop menu

as it is, it's a rather sparse prefs panel.  two of the items (enable 
desktop menu, show icons in desktop menu) i consider essential.  the 
others... not so much.

note that ditching the 'Menu' tab shouldn't be a goal of deciding which 
options (if any) should exist.  when xfdesktop supports icons on the 
desktop, i'm going to have to add a tab for prefs related to that, 
anyway.

while i'm here...  any suggestions on how to improve the look of the 
current settings dialog when there's more than one screen?  with one 
screen, the inner tab notebook disappears, but with multiple screens, 
you get two nested notebooks.  unless someone has a brilliant idea 
(i don't like using an option menu to select the screen), i'm pretty 
much resigned to the need for the nested notebooks.  any ideas to make 
it look better?

yeah...  so sorry about my tendency to ramble on.  i guess i just think 
too much about this sort of stuff.  opinions and suggestions would be 
most welcome.  as long as you don't get pissed off at me if i don't 
agree with you ^_~.

	-brian