menu editing

[George]

On Tue, May 13, 2003 at 10:10:49PM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
> > On the other hand I think that perhaps we're getting to a point where
> > designing a better UI then the menu system might be good.  If we stay with
> > the menus then I really think that editting them through the VFS is sort
> > of a crappy workaround and not a real solution.  It will never be perfect,
> > and so I think exposing the underlying menu structure in an editor may
> > be better.
> 
> Sure, but what better UI? One that reflects the keyword based nature of
> the menu has been suggested several times, the main thing being that
> Havoc wants a solution to replace the broken one now, which is fair
> enough. I suppose at some point somebody will have to experiment a bit
> with it.

Since it seems that mostly geeks organize edit their menus, I think it can be
more complicated to do so and just let the keyword based nature seep through
the UI.

The basic idea behind the whole vfolder approach is to completely avoid the
problem of having to organize things yourself.  The menu should be "self
organizing".  New things are added to proper places and upon upgrades perhaps
submenus are changed and all things move appropriately.  Distributors and
sysadmins are the ones that "organize" things and they just edit the vfolder
file.  I still believe this is the biggest use of "menu editting".  These
people SHOULD NOT be editting things through the VFS in the first place,
they should do it with some tool that gives them the full power of editting
the vfolder file itself.

> We already tried this in my project by adding Action keywords to the
> .desktop file, but GNOME doesn't support them :( Plus right click menus
> are a bit nasty usability wise, it might not be terribly obvious how to
> remove apps. The only ways around that I can think of are a Windows
> style "add/remove programs" capplet or dragging apps to the wastebasket 
> a la MacOS, but that needs VFS support so we're back to the start.

Well it doesn't neccessairly have to replace package management.  But if
the user does a delete on a .desktop, he probably means to whack the
application.  The filemanager should deal with this even if it doesn't
provide a complete package management database.  So say you drag a .desktop
file with X-RPM-Package=foo line to the trash, then the filemanager could
notice that and ask you what you wanted to do.  Say:

"You have requested to delete the icon for application Foo which is part of
the package 'foo'.  Do you wish to remove the entire package 'foo'?"

My wife tends to do this on her windows box (yeah yeah I know, stop laughing,
she will use linux at some point, she just needs a bit more "conditioning"):
If she decides she doesn't like a particular application anymore, she deletes
the icons.  Apparently she knows that this doesn't delete the application
itself, but she doesn't care enough to go through figuring out how to delete
an application.

George

-- 
George <jirka at 5z.com>
   It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
                       -- Albert Einstein