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. The two HIGs I consulted (and actually the two we base LyX UI on) have this to say: "Menus should contain between three and twelve items, and submenus should contain between three and six items." No word about hiding or not hiding items, but it's clear that you can only achieve this by selective display. https://developer.gnome.org/hig/patterns/controls/menus.html?highlight=menu And "Don't put more than 12 items within a single level of a menu. Add separators between logical groups within a menu. Organize the menu items into groups of seven or fewer strongly related items." It also says: "Disable menu items that don't apply to the current context instead of removing them from view. Exception: It is acceptable to hide menu items completely if they are permanently unavailable on the user's system due to missing hardware capabilities." But this is hard to achieve with the number of items we have. In any case, however this discussion turns out, this is not something to be implemented so shortly before a major release. If done, it has to be implemented very early in a development cycle and then carefully tested. -- Jürgen -- lyx-devel mailing list lyx-devel@lists.lyx.org http://lists.lyx.org/mailman/listinfo/lyx-devel
