Subject: FVWM: new idea: better feel for popup menus

From: Neil Zanella <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 10:25:04 -0230 (NDT)

Hello,

How often have you opened up a menu in fvwm and you were just too close to

one of the borders of the screen?

I suggest adding an option to fvwm2 to do the following with Popup menus:

divide the screen into 4 quadrants:

|----------|----------|
|          |          |
|    2     |    1     |
|          |          |
|----------|----------|
|          |          |
|    3     |    4     |
|          |          |
|----------|----------|

In quadrant 2 popup menus act as they normally would.

In quadrants 1 and 4 the menus appear with the arrow widgets on the left 

of the menu and pointing to the left instead of being on the right pointing 

to the right.

In quadrants 3 and 4 menus are to fall upwards instead of downwards.

...

this scheme would have th advantage of redirecting menus away from boarders of 

screens thus making selection of items easier.

Best Regards,

Neil Zanella
[email-masked]
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---

From: Robert Earl <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 07:00:01 -0700 (PDT)

> divide the screen into 4 quadrants:

I disagree; I think this adds complexity at the risk of confusing
the user. Personally, I'd be always trying to second-guess the window
manager's choice of menu direction.

That said, I wonder if anyone's ever tried using vertical mouse movement
as the hint on which way to pop a menu? i.e., I click on the root window
and begin dragging down, THEN the menu appears in the direction I just
moved the mouse.

As for the horizontal submenus, I use 'em, I hate 'em. The arrows are
too small, I'm always chasing them to get the right one to pop out
(My mouse doesn't track very well either). When the wrong one pops up,
it invariably covers the arrow of the menu I wanted to use, etc. etc.

Has anyone ever used piewm? I haven't, but I was tempted more than
once.  It is(was?) a twm clone with round, pie-shaped popup menus,
apparently. The documentation said that selecting an entry by flicking
the mouse radially was a quicker and more natural method than going down
a vertical list of choices.

> screens thus making selection of items easier.

As you can see, I expect a lot more out of a change in the menu interface :-)
Don't get me wrong, the popup menus are OK as-is, I use them quite often
to start netscape, remote logins, and window operations. But I'd certainly
appreciate a higher level of control over their look-and-feel. Yeah,
yeah, modules can probably do all that, but they might introduce too
much latency.

--robert

---

From: Dan Espen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 10:15:13 -0400

> yeah, modules can probably do all that, but they might introduce too

When and if we ever see another release of fvwm2, the menu code will
include the animated menu patch, solving the menu placement problems.

My own opinion is, use the keyboard to operate your menus.

--
Dan Espen                                Phone: (732) 699-5570
444 Hoes Lane  Room RRC 1C-214           E-mail: [email-masked]
Piscataway, NJ 08854
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---

From: William Denton <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 10:27:17 -0400 (EDT)

On Tue, 18 Aug 1998, Dan Espen wrote:

: When and if we ever see another release of fvwm2 ...

Perhaps the users list could have an update on where the next release
is?  I think I remember hearing the new maintainer was going to put
out a release including all the recent patches, but then I think that
got postponed.  The "official" web page hasn't been updated since
May.  If the workers list is active, perhaps other regular users would
be as interested as I am in a brief monthly update on how things are
going?

Bill
-- 
William Denton | Toronto, Canada | http://www.vex.net/~buff/ | Caveat lector.
		    "Let's keep the party polite."