[RFC] Context-Menu Handling in KDevelop4

[Jakob Petsovits]

On Tuesday, 8. May 2007, Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> > Can you even imagine how hard it
> > will be to coach new users through the program or put up a FAQ
> > considering that their GUI might be very different from yours based on
> > their usage patterns?
>
> Uhm, the context menu is dynamic and as it currently stands the order
> cannot be fixed, unless we sort the entries by alphabetic order. Else
> the order will be the loading order of plugins.

Wouldn't it be possible to add a "weight" property to such an entity (either 
menu entry or plugin, whatever is more reasonable) and sort the context menu 
based on that property?

Sorting the menu dynamically will be phenomenally bad from a usability point 
of view, you lose all reliability of what you can expect where.

Also, scrollable menus are ridiculous, because once you've got so many menu 
entries that you need to scroll, your menus are a chaotic mess anyways.
(The rule of thumb says that menus should not contain more than 7 items,
if possible.)

My vote goes for sub-menus with per-plugin  items, sorted by a weight number 
(say, -20 to +20).

Regards,
  Jakob