[RFC] Context-Menu Handling in KDevelop4

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 08.05.07 21:22:22, Jakob Petsovits wrote:
> 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?

Well, code wise no problem, however who gets to decide which entry gets
which weight?

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

Well, its not completely random in kdev3 - AFAIK. After all the editor
context menu looks the same everytime. I guess the order is set by the
list of plugins in the profile.

> 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.)

Well, then we need to make sure to never populate a context menu or menu
in general like the custom makefile manager did in KDev3. It populates
the targets menu under Build with all targets it can find in the whole
project. This list is extremely huge and would clearly benefit from such
scrolling things.

The same goes for the navigation stuff in KDev3's editor context menu
(if that still exists, didn't check lately).

Andreas

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