Don't hide menus

[Daniel]

On 2023-10-13 15:10, Scott Kostyshak wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 13, 2023 at 10:43:45AM +0200, Jürgen Spitzmüller wrote:
>> Am Freitag, dem 13.10.2023 um 08:05 +0200 schrieb Daniel:
>>> It seems to be a rather universally accepted UI rule that menu items
>>> should not be hidden. Feel free to can check your favorite apps or
>>> search the recommendation on the web. (There is also the more extreme
>>> recommendations to not even disable menu entries but I think it is
>>> generally agreed that this is a bad idea because it leaves the user
>>> clicking in vain.)
>>
>> Don't like it since
>>
>> 1.) we will end up in overcrowded menus full of disabled entries. Too
>> long for sure in some cases
>>
>> 2.) we will run out of accelerators. We currently can provide
>> accelerators in the insert and edit menus only since we only show
>> active items.
>>
>> I know you don't care about accelerators as they seem to be not common
>> on Mac OS. However, I find them a key element of accessibility and much
>> more important that some sort of user didactic by showing which
>> functions there might be. I also don't see what users gain if they see
>> a disabled function as long as they don't learn when and how it is
>> enabled.
> 
> I have mixed opinions. If we don't include the disabled items, perhaps
> we can agree on a guideline for which items to include when disabled and
> which not. This way we can try to at least be consistent.

As a start, I would suggest that hiding a menu should be a last resort. 
That is not very specific, but at least in some menus, such as 
"Document", there seems to be no need to hide menus according to this rule.

> It might be helpful to have a few "use cases" to discuss. For example,
> "Document" > Cancel Export is included only when an export is present.

Yes, that is a good example of a menu entry that is hard to discover and 
is located in a menu that is hardly long. In fact, I only stumbled upon 
it this morning: https://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/12932. (But maybe that 
is how you came to think of it.)

Daniel