GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 145507
rearrangement of Xtns Menu options
Last modified: 2006-06-27 18:02:21 UTC
Description of Request: Menus that are more user friendly. The information that script writers need is in the script; the menu entry can be more user centric. Starting first with the <Toolbox>Xtns Menu, I have been trying to rearrange the scripts in a way that a user can see easier what to expect. It should not matter if the script is written in python or perl. what should matter is what the script should do. The New Structure <Toolbox>/Xtns/: Module Manager DB Browser Plugin Details Unit Editor ---------------------- * Perl --> Browser Console Server ------------ * Help --> * Documentation --> * Bookmarks --> * Test --> * Python-Fu --> Browser Console Server ------------ * Help --> * Documentation --> * Bookmarks --> * Test --> * Script-Fu --> Browser Console Server ------------ * Help --> * Documentation --> * Bookmarks --> * Test --> ---------------------- * Animation --> * Render --> * Art --> * Patterns --> * Shapes --> * Themes --> * Web --> * Logos --> * Navigation --> * Low Res Print --> * Logos --> * Navigation --> * High Res Print --> * Logos --> * Navigation --> * Utilities --> Some names will need to be changed. Several of the plug-ins use different scripts to accomplish the same thing. I have no problem with duplicate entries into the proper menu. Sphere Designer is an example of this. The menu name should reflect the scripting environment used. SF Sphere Designer and Perl Sphere Designer. Such menu options offer a user more than any other graphic manipulation application could ever dream of. I am attaching a web-browser.scm that reflects some of the changes I propose here. If we can agree on a menu system, i am willing to make the bazillion minor changes to the script-fus to close this bug.
Created attachment 29276 [details] additonal bookmarks
This proposal seems to add quite a few new menu entries. What's the benefit of doing that? I'd rather see less bookmarks or none at all. BTW, there's a proposal to move the Pattern scripts to Image->Filters->Render and have them render on an existing image. I tend to agree with that proposal.
Before GIMP 2.0 we basically agreed that we should not have any external links in our menus. The reason for that is that we don't have any control over these web pages and would have to release a new version of GIMP when the link changes. Links to external pages should be kept on www.gimp.org. I basically like the proposed menu structure except for all the Help and Test menus. They should not be there.
The first menu you see would be this: <Toolbox>/Xtns/ Module Manager DB Browser Plugin Details Unit Editor ------------------- * Perl --> * Python-Fu --> * Script-Fu --> ------------------- * Animation --> * Render --> * Utilities --> Even now, typing that here, i can see that animation should probably go into render as well ... If you install python and perl, you get several different menus at this level and I found the perl ones to make more sense. It is easy to re-register the logo script-fu with defaults that make sense for different needs and would have solved some real life problems where the user does not understand the need for bigger images depending on where the image is used. As it stands, there exists at the same tier in the menus things like Font Table and Pixel Generator and I have a problem remembering which scripting language made which plug-in. It is difficult to imagine that I am alone with this problem.
I guess I would actually prefer to offer the script on my web pages. if i put it in the scripting sections, hopefully, anyone smart enough to use it would also be smart enough to keep the script up-to-date.
No idea what script is being refered to here. As I said already, the proposed menu structure looks good except for the external links. It would be nice to get a patch for this change so we could apply it right after we branched for gimp 2.3.
Unless something changes, I can start to work on this at the end of this week (October 6 or 7 or 8). I am worried about the fact that there are two versions of the original script-fu scripts, Script-Fu and now Tiny-Fu. It seems there should be some coordination of this between me and Kevin if I am to continue with this. I have been watching the gtk people make the menus bigger and was thinking that making menus smaller was not the goal of the community since posting this bug report originally. We discussed the bookmarks on #gimp a few months ago which made me not want to include them in the source, Maintenance and worry about external urls were the primary reason not to attach the script here.
I have almost all of the scripts in plug-ins/script-fu/scripts/ that appear in the Xtns menu moved to either Render or Utility. It doesn't make sense to continue at this point, as I went to make the same changes in gimp-tiny-fu; being an identical version of the same scripts. What makes sense is to wait until the Script-fu is separated from the gimp source code as has been discussed.
Why don't you attach your patch now? You shouldn't have to worry about tiny-fu.
alright. i ran "cvs diff >scripts.diff". good luck!
Created attachment 32469 [details] cvs diff spit of scripts
See bug #158980 for an alternative approach that would remove all Logo scripts from the Toolbox menu.
that suggestion works for me.
This bug report had some very useful suggestions for the Xtns menu. Even if we implement the Logo browser suggested in bug #158980, the remaining menu entries should still be rearranged as suggested here. Reopening.
as tempting as it is right now to play open and close the bug report, would you consider to close this and work on the other one? i tried to work with these ideas. what was easy to think about was terrible on the computer. i think that some of the menu paths would actually hit the edge of some monitors and have to start opening in the other direction before you got to the entry. the browser idea looks good for what i was trying to do here.
This should be reexamined during the current menu reorganization. Setting the milestone accordingly.
The biggest problem that needs to be addressed (as I see it) in the Xtns menu is how to handle different scripts that do the same thing. Right now, the way gimp works, if there is a duplicate (perl colorhtml and python colorhtml as an example) the perl scripts load first and when the python script loads, the register removes the perl script. here is an example of the error message I get when I start gimp: (gimp:7038): LibGimpBase-WARNING **: gimp: wire_read(): error removing duplicate PDB procedure "file_colorhtml_save" registered by '/usr/local/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins/colorhtml.py' A couple of questions: 1. Is this the way gimp-2.4 is going to work? 2. Is this the best way to handle it? 3. Are there other options This works right now simply because there is more activity (development/maintenance) in gimp-python right now. What about later though?
I've moved all the script categories out of Xtns->Script-Fu. Language-specific tools such as Refresh, and Test categories, stay in the language menu entries. We had a lively discussion on IRC in which mitch suggested that the best place for them was actually File->New (and the existing File->New... would be renamed to New Image...), but the issue was which File->New. Ideally, they would be registered in one place but show up in File-New in both the toolbox and image windows. There's some sort of infrastructure coming related to global menus which might help with that and might restructure the toolbox menus anyway. We decided that for now, just getting them out of Script-Fu so users don't have to know what language scripts are written in was the important thing.
One other thing: external packages like perl-fu which install scripts with duplicate names should probably change to use a unique name, especially if they register in the same place in the menus -- but even if they don't, using a unique name makes it a lot easier for people or tutorials to talk about them and for users to find them. I didn't change the name of the python-fu test sphere script, but perhaps it should be changed to "Test Sphere" or "PySphere" or something. Since it's in the Python-Fu/Test menu it didn't seem critical.
2005-10-16 Akkana Peck <akkana@shallowsky.com> Move the script categories that were in Xtns->Script-Fu directly into Xtns. Language specific tools (e.g. Refresh, Console) remain in language-specific menus. Bug 145507.
Raising priority now because this should be revisited to see if anything more needs to be done for the upcoming 2.4 release. If not, this report should either be resolved or bumped.
Let's close this as FIXED. A new bug report can be opened if anyone has a good idea on how to further improve things.