Re: FVWM: new idea: better feel for popup menus

From: Robert Earl <rearl_at_teleport.com>
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 07:00:01 -0700 (PDT)

> How often have you opened up a menu in fvwm and you were just too close to
> one of the borders of the screen?
>
> I suggest adding an option to fvwm2 to do the following with Popup menus:
> divide the screen into 4 quadrants:

I disagree; I think this adds complexity at the risk of confusing
the user. Personally, I'd be always trying to second-guess the window
manager's choice of menu direction.

That said, I wonder if anyone's ever tried using vertical mouse movement
as the hint on which way to pop a menu? i.e., I click on the root window
and begin dragging down, THEN the menu appears in the direction I just
moved the mouse.

As for the horizontal submenus, I use 'em, I hate 'em. The arrows are
too small, I'm always chasing them to get the right one to pop out
(My mouse doesn't track very well either). When the wrong one pops up,
it invariably covers the arrow of the menu I wanted to use, etc. etc.

Has anyone ever used piewm? I haven't, but I was tempted more than
once. It is(was?) a twm clone with round, pie-shaped popup menus,
apparently. The documentation said that selecting an entry by flicking
the mouse radially was a quicker and more natural method than going down
a vertical list of choices.

> this scheme would have th advantage of redirecting menus away from boarders of
> screens thus making selection of items easier.

As you can see, I expect a lot more out of a change in the menu interface :-)
Don't get me wrong, the popup menus are OK as-is, I use them quite often
to start netscape, remote logins, and window operations. But I'd certainly
appreciate a higher level of control over their look-and-feel. Yeah,
yeah, modules can probably do all that, but they might introduce too
much latency.

--robert
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Received on Tue Aug 18 1998 - 09:00:23 BST

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