[another PATCH]: Kicker find as you type

[Fred Schaettgen]

On Tuesday, 3. May 2005 15:46, Stephan Kulow wrote:
> Am Dienstag 03 Mai 2005 15:23 schrieb Fred Schaettgen:
> > Or why do we even need a search line in the "configure shortcuts" dialog?
> > This search line is now ubiquos throughout KDE, so few will be surprised
> > to see it in the K-Menu.
>
> Because it's a menu not a dialog. If you had chosen a different way to
> present the applications/bookmarks and added a line edit in there, I
> wouldn't have a problem with that, but making an ugly thing (a broken and
> unstructured menu) even more ugly is not going to help.

The point is that I try hard not to present the applications in another way, 
but keep them in a single place instead. 
If you keep using a desktop search engine, which displays results in a flat 
list you will forget where the documents are really located at some point. 
Then it gets even harder to find the documents in the directory structure.

And I don't think that the kmenu is that broken and unstructured. The only way 
to make it considerably smaller is uninstall programs you don't use and don't 
use bookmark etc. 
But just like the control center it's sometimes not obvious in which category 
a program belong. Then a search comes in handy. But at the same time the user 
should learn, which category was chosen for the program.
If the search results are presented by an external program, which just tells 
me the location in the k-menu as text or just in different representation, 
then *I* have to map this to the actual kmenu. If we use the kmenu itself to 
present search results, then I just have to remember a picture, which is much 
easier for human beings.
If the kmenu would look more or less the same, but wasn't derived from 
QPopupMenu menu, but as a "popup dialog", would you be as concerned as you 
are now?
You can already search in this have-been-qpopupmenu, you can drag icons and 
the menu items even have context menus themselves, and I don't think this 
makes it broken and ugly. I even expect this from the kmenu, even though 
that's not how regular popup menus work.
I wonder why exactly this is ugly from a user's point of view.



-- 
Fred Schaettgen
kde.sch at ttgen.net