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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Proposal for menu & toolbar editing
From:       Paul Pacheco <paul.pacheco () wavecode ! com>
Date:       2001-04-17 12:36:37
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Hi,

I just had an Idea that I think would be very cool.

A tipical kde aplication has the menu and toolbar defined in a separated xml 
and has a set of actions. Now throgh the configure toolbar, you can modify 
the contents of the xml to change what actions are shown in the toolbar.

I am thinking about going one step further:

- First, there is no reason (that I can see) why the toolbar editing can not 
be drag & drop. For example pop up a window that lists all the actions and 
available, like the dialog we have right now, but allow actions to be draged 
from this windows into the applications toolbar, this would be very intuitive 
way of editing the toolbar.

- Allow drag and drop whithout the toolbar editing window being oppened. This 
way, I could move one button to a position that I particularly like very 
easily and in a very natural way.

- Here is a real step further. Allow drag and drop in the menus. In much the 
same way the toolbars are edited and saved in the xml-gui for the 
application, the menus could be edited. This would allow me to move my 
favorites actions in the menu to the top of the menu, or something like that. 
For example many people don't like the menu layout of konqueror and would 
like something more IE like or netscape like. Instead of opening the xml-gui 
file, they would simply drag the options to the desired position. Beside drag 
and drop, I think the toolbar editing dialog (or maybe another dialog ) 
should be able to modify the menu using only the keyboard.

- Allow drag and drop between the menus and the toolbar. If I like a 
particular action that is listed in the menu, It would be cool if I could 
drag and drop it to the toolbar. For consistency, I would suggest allowing it 
the other way around also.

Note that if an aplication is based on xml-gui and kactions, there is no 
reason why much would have to be changed in the application. In fact, I think 
nothing would have to be changed in particular applications but in qt (for 
menu drag & drop maybe) and kdelibs (for xml-gui editing), allowing all the 
xml-gui aplications immediatelly take advantage of this.

Am I dreaming? I have not seen such a configurable gui in any other OS or 
desktop environment and this would really be innovative.

Any suggestions? other ideas? reasons against this? any volunteer?
 
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