GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 119102
Duplicate in-menu preferences in the prefs page?
Last modified: 2020-12-04 18:19:54 UTC
(forwarded from http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=204109) It is unclear where to place menu items which duplicate (for fast access) parts or the preerences dialog box. A typical example is "Word Wrap" check menu item. Should it be placed in the Edit menu together with "Preferences" menu item? Seems a very unsuitable place as it clutters Edit menu with strange-to-be-here items. In my opinion in such the case we should create separate Settings menu where these items (together with "Preferences" item moved from "Edit" menu) will reside. But what to do if there are only one menu item duplicating-a-part-of-preferences dialog? In this case if we will follow my above suggestion we would have 2 items Edit menu which contradicts to the rule >=3 items in a menu. In this case (of one such item) I suggest to leave "Preferences" in "Edit" menu, and place this fast-access-to-a-preference item directly above it (without separator between it and "Preferences" item).
I think the typical answer would be you shouldn't put preference items in the menu. In the example of word wrap, whats the use case of this outside of a find dialog? It should be available from the find dialog but not from the general menus. Maybe I am missing something.
Funnily enough I've had a note on my whiteboard for months to write about something similar :) Word wrap possibly isn't the best example, but it's one thing that could conceivably live on a text editor's View menu as well as in its Preferences dialog. The question is whether things like that should appear in both places, or how to decide which of the two if not. I don't think the answer is to create a Settings menu though; we deliberately recommended Edit->Preferences so that Settings menus (and particularly Settings menus with only one entry in them) would die. Nor do I think any such preferences should be confined to any one menu, if we allow them at all-- they should almost certainly go on whichever menu they would go if there was no Preferences dialog. (Which in the majority of cases is probably the View menu).
Retitling (crappy retitle, but still more descriptive)
Nowadays, we recommend that menu items for application preferences are added to the application menu. This seems like a good fit to me - in abstract terms, the object for preferences is the application.