Subject: bug#1056: Filesets menu location

From: "Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:18:02 +0200

David Reitter wrote:
> On 30 Sep 2008, at 12:15, Glenn Morris wrote:
> 
>>>> From: Dominic Dunlop <[email-masked]>
>> [...]
>>>> Although the Filesets menu is nice to have (although I found it a
>>>> bit of a bear to set up), I find its position between the
>>>> application and file menus to be continually jarring. Apple's Human
>>>> Interface Design Guidelines...
>>
>> Heaven forfend we should disagree with such a document...
> 
> true :)
> but that said, it goes against a rather wide-spread standard... File,
> Edit, and then whatever...

Didn't we have a discussion like that before where we agreed that
nothing should be placed before "File Edit" by default?

In my opinion it definitively should go in the File menu, probably close
to "Open File ...".

> I think a good default would be either next to the Buffers menu (to the
> left, probably), because of the semantics, or simply inside the File
> menu (again, semantics).  The latter would be supported by the fact that
> the menu bar tends to get quite crowded especially on smallish (15")
> laptop screens.

I think it would be good with some rather big reorganisation of the
menus. Some thoughts about it:

- Most Emacs users seems to use the menus very little.
- They are however important to new users.
- The menu bar tends to be clottered by too many things.
- The most important use of the menu bar is probably not doing something
quickly.
- More important is probably finding commands you do not know about.
- If this is true then a more conceptual organisation is probably the best.
- Also it will be useful to put more commands in the menus.
- It does not really matter if the menu is deep for those commands where
we merely want to point out that they exists.

Some things I would like to be done:
- Get all nice search and replace commands into the Edit menu. Quite a
lot of them are missing in the menus. (For example it would be nice to
have isearch "continuation" entries there, ie jump to Occur, to Query
Replace etc.)

- Make a new entry, perhaps called "Display" in the menu bar.
- Under display I would put "Buffers", "Frames" and "Windows" (and in
the future perhaps some grouping concept like project, application (it
is an OS, isn't it?)).

- Make a new entry "Minor" (after the major mode entry) where all minor
modes should go by default.
- Divide this in global and buffer local entries, perhaps by putting an
entry "Global" there with a submenu.