Re: [Denemo-devel] Custom menus

[Richard Shann]

On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 20:17 +0200, Jean-René Reinhard wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 09:24:31AM +0100, Richard Shann wrote:
> > 
> > Mulling this over, an improvement to the interface to custom menus would
> > be this.
> > Instead of a Favorites menu, adding a new menu item can be something you
> > can access when you right click on a menu item. So, you have found the
> > place where you would like to see Multi-Measure rests (perhaps you are
> > looking under Measure, or Rest ...) and you right-click for help and you
> > can set a shortcut, read the tooltip, etc as usual, but also, add in a
> > new menu item there, to do the thing you wanted.
> 
> I don't think that allowing the user to setup the menu as he wants is good 
> from
> an UI point of view. He may end up not knowing where he put everything. 
> Having a
> sensible layout defined by the developpers seems more desirable to me.
You are right if there is a finite number of actions that could be
useful to users and if they could all be put into a menu system, and if
the users could navigate the result.
But we are interfacing to a language which has infinite possibilities of
expression. When I look up something in the LilyPond manual it takes me
some time to navigate to the right part of the manual, and then I cut
and paste the example of how to do it (e.g. add Da Capo al fine in
italics below the staff).
The next time I have the same thing, I look up my old file, fish out the
LilyPond insert and paste it into the new one.
If instead I could have created a menu item for this and put it in the
Expressive Marks menu (and deleted most of what is there already), I
could work more quickly.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of pieces of syntax which could be
intalled as hard-wired code in the program. Allowing folks to pick them
from a gallery and put them in (by default they would go into a
particular menu, since the originator of the LilyPond insert would have
chosen a place to put it) to the menu system would be a Good Thing.
Richard