Don't hide menus

[Daniel]

Sorry, wrong list! Was supposed to go to the devel list.

Daniel

On 2023-10-13 08:03, Daniel wrote:
> 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.)
> 
> I am referring here foremost to the main menu items. Context-menus may 
> be treated differently because they are expected to be context-dependent 
> (as the name suggests).
> 
> Among the main reasons for why menu items should not be hidden are that 
> with hidden menus users have a harder time
> 
> 1) discovering features
> 2) figuring out and remembering where menu items are located
> 
> Notice that these two may be hard to appreciate for developers because 
> they typically know the entries independently of whether they are shown. 
> And I seem to remember a couple of instances where users were asking 
> about missing features on the list which were due to OptItems being hard 
> to discover.
> 
> In contrast to other applications, LyX has a greater number of menu 
> entries that become hidden. I am not sure about what the history of this 
> special behavior of LyX is but maybe it had to do with a trade-off in a 
> time when screen size/resolution was quite limited?
> 
> I have made a test and changed all OptItems to Items in the 
> stdmenus.inc. That might not show all the menu items since there are 
> some whose "expansion" is hard-coded. Those expansions should typically 
> have a disabled "empty" entry when there is nothing to expand. See, 
> e.g., Navigate > (Empty Table of Contents) which is a perfect example of 
> informing a user about a feature with a disabled entry while the feature 
> is unavailable.
> 
> With this change I found that the length of the menus seemed totally 
> acceptable to me (and at least not longer than for other "word 
> processors").
> 
> The only exception were the various inset settings in the "Edit" menu. 
> However, these seem to be mutually exclusive. So, there are different 
> ways to resolve this problem. For example, to create one settings entry 
> that rules them all and shows a disabled "Inset Setting..." when 
> unavailable. In the short term, one might even have an exception here 
> for using OptItems for this specific case.
> 
> Best,
> Daniel
>