Opinions on removing the menubar/toolbar from the text-ui

[Daniele E. Domenichelli]

On 27/03/12 15:50, Rohan Garg wrote:
> To sum up, I'd like to hear your thoughts on removing either the
> menubar or the toolbar. One of them *has* to go.


- Toolbars and Menubars are not the same thing.

Toolbar is something you can customize with the actions you use more 
often, while Menubar is something that should allow you to use any 
actions, even the ones that you removed from the toolbar. I don't want a 
toolbar item to share my desktop because I never use it, but I want to 
be able to do it without re-customizing the actions in my toolbar if I 
need to.

- Toolbars take more space than Menubars

Toolbars usually have larger icons, larger fonts and show the text on 
the side. On small screens (netbooks) that's really important. Moreover 
menubars allows you to use the dbus-menu and that takes a lot less space 
than a toolbar on very small screens. I don't think that dolphin wrench 
stuff is exported to dbus-menu, but I'm still on 4.7 and the wrench icon 
is not there yet, so I might be wrong. Anyway the wrench approach is 
imho a menu with less options and an extra click, that you cannot be 
sure to find in a certain place. If you are using the same icon for 
something else it can cause confusion. There are other approaches 
(search the blog posts about dbus-menu in oxygen decoration) that are a 
lot better than the wrench one.

- It's not true that Toolbar is faster than Menubar

First of all, actions are hidden if the size of the window is too small, 
so you have to click on the small arrow ">" on the right, moving the 
mouse over a small arrow is a lot slower than moving it over a menu. 
Realizing that an action is hidden because the toolbar is too small 
takes even more time. A normal user will never click on that arrow 
unless he knows what to expect from there, so he will never know that he 
has more actions hidden there.
Finally there was this hud-like krunner that would allow you to remove 
the menubar completely and to use just <Alt + r> and keep typing on the 
keyboard, instead of moving the mouse and clicking on the menu item.

- Menubars are informative

Menubars show the shortcut for an action, toolbars don't. Users learn 
new shortcuts from menus, and that speeds up their work. With toolbars 
you will always have to click on them.


So my opinion is NO, both of them must stay, because they have 2 
different roles in the user experience. You can hide the menu bar if you 
don't like it (Settings > Show Menubar in the text-ui or <Ctrl + m> as I 
just discovered by looking at it) or hide the toolbars, or even both if 
you want.


Daniele