Plasma menubar design questions

[todd rme]

2010/6/2 Aurélien Gâteau <aurelien.gateau at canonical.com>:
> Hi,
>
> As you probably know if you read PlanetKDE, I am working on implementing
> a global menubar for KDE, using DBusMenu. Here is a link to the post in
> case you missed it:
>
> http://agateau.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/getting-menus-out-of-application-windows/
>
> It is composed of a Qt patch and a Plasma menubar widget.
>
> It is starting to work reasonably, but I have some design questions
> though: what should the widget show when no application is active?
> Similarly, what should it show when the selected application window has
> no menubar?
>
> Right now it just shows a "Menu" item which contains a disabled "No
> items" entry, but this can probably be improved. What do you think would
> be the best?
>
> Aurélien


I am not sure if this is possible based on how kwin works, but would
it be possible to also have the kwin window menu (what you get when
you click on the title bar icon or right-click on the title bar)?  If
you did this, it would always be shown even if there is no menu.  This
would also be useful for window decorations that lack title bars.

If there is no window selected, I don't see why it needs to show
anything.  The task manager, for instance, is empty when there are no
open windows and no one seems to have a problem with that.  An
alternative would be to show a list of open windows (which would be
empty if no windows were open).  I don't think it is a good idea to
stick something in there just for the sake of having something,
though.

-Todd