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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Proposal for menu & toolbar editing
From:       Waldo Bastian <bastian () kde ! org>
Date:       2001-04-17 18:02:05
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On Tuesday 17 April 2001 05:36, Paul Pacheco wrote:
> 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.

Yes.

> - 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.

Maybe. I typically don't like buttons being draggable becuase you often end 
up with unintended drags. On the other end, it seems to work reasonably well 
with kicker, so I guess the thresholds that we use are effective in this 
regard.

> - 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.

I don't see the need for drag&drop in this area. It _could_ be done of 
course, but I think that the benfits are very limited and don't outweigh the 
costs.

> - 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. 

Yes.

> For consistency, I would suggest allowing
> it the other way around also.

Hm.. perhaps. The general rule is that all toolbar actions should be present 
in the menu as well. From that follows that it makes little sense to drag 
items from the toolbar to the menu.

> 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?

Looking forward to your code :-)

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
bastian@kde.org | SuSE Labs KDE Developer | bastian@suse.com
 
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