O Peter, Where Art Thou? This is getting nasty quickly. On 28.08.2010 20:13, Sven Neumann wrote: > On Fri, 2010-08-27 at 07:32 +0200, Martin Nordholts wrote: > >>>> If I want a colour , I should find it on the colour menu . If I want to >>>> select layers I should fine the necessary interface elements on the >>>> layer menu. >>> >>> Sounds reasonable. We could duplicate the menu items from the Dockables >>> menu that raise/create those dialogs in the places where they belong. So >>> we would have "Layers dialog" in the "Image/Layers" menu and the like. >>> That's as simple as editing the XML files in the menus sub-directory. >>> Perhaps someone wants to come up with a patch... >> >> I don't think we should duplicate any menu items. Having things in two >> places tends to cause unnecessary confusion. A user will have to answer >> questions like "Why is this menu item in two places? Is it the same menu >> item? Does it do the same thing? Which one should I use now?" Having >> just one place to do things avoids such ambiguity and mental friction. > > We do that for a few menu items already and I don't think it has ever > caused any problems. Some examples are (and there are many more): > > Edit->Undo History > View->Navigation Window > Select->Selection Editor > Colors->Info->Histogram > > Actually I think it's just an oversight that the Layers dialog is > missing from the Layers menu. IMO all dialogs should be accessible from > the menus where they belong to functionally. The "Dockables" menu is > just a place to list all the available dialogs. It should be secondary. Another thing to note is that the 'Add Tab' entry from the dockable context menu provides a list of available dockables as well. I think i can explain why this additional option for dockable creation does not create much mental friction: When i'm browsing the 'Layer' menu, i'm thinking of what can be done with layers. Here is the place to discover the layers dialog -- i can find it here even if i do not have prior knowledge that a layers dialog exists at all. On the other hand, when adding a tab to an existing docbook using the 'Add Tab' menu, i'm configuring my workspace to better suit the task at hand -- that's a different kind of process than browsing for layer functionality. Windows->Dockable Dialogs is literally in the middle of these two choices. Perhaps we can weasel out by proclaiming that this isn't a 'menu' but just a list of available dialogs and thus no decision has to be made about which menu to use... That is, paraphrasing what Sven said. Also, interesting to note how differently the word 'dialog' gets perceived. bye, yahvuu _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
