GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 130243
menu opening wrong direction
Last modified: 2014-03-27 02:55:57 UTC
Description of Problem: I prefer to have the pannel on the right hand side, when it is there and you click on the foot menu, the menu opens to the left, when navigating to a sub menu it opens right when it should open left (that way it does not open back on itself) Steps to reproduce the problem: 1. Move panel to right hand side 2. click on foot menu 3. navigate to sub menu Actual Results: menu opens right after main layer Expected Results: should open left when panel is on right How often does this happen? every time Additional Information:
Menus are always opening to the right hand side if there's enough room (and if not, they open to the left hand side). I'm sure we don't want to change this (it wouldn't be consistent). But I'm cc'ing usability people to get feedback before closing the bug.
Usability people: ping?
There's almost certainly some scope for improvement, but I expect any solution would turn out to be a litte more involved than "menu should open on left when panel is on right"... although that could certainly describe the desired result. Since people generally move the mouse towards the arrow to open a submenu (even though the whole title is active), the main annoyance for most people is actually that the submenu arrows point to the right even when the menu is going to open to the left. So one idea for the future might be for a menu to check before it's posted if any of its submenus need to be displayed on the left, and if so, draw all its submenu arrows on the left rather than the right. (And consequently display them all on the left too). That could still mean a different orientation at different levels of the menu though, so it could be that each submenu should inherit its parent's orientation too. Have I lost anyone yet? :)
Calum: what you're saying is not specific to gnome-panel, isn't it? Should I move the bug to gtk+?
Right, any fix of that sort of nature would be a gtk+ enhancement. If people agree that fixing it there is the right thing to do, then by all means change the category. (I have an inkling it might be a dup anyway.)
Another related thing is that once the menu system decides on a direction, it should keep using that direction. Ie., if for some reason a menu has to open to the left, _its_ submenus should menus should also go left. (Although multi-nested submenus are dubious anyway).
The problem with moving the arrow to the other side or just flipping it to point to where the submenu will appear is that this depends on how wide each submenu is, so that you will end up with a mixture of arrows, which would visually disturbing. This has already been discussed in another bug and basically WONTFIXed for that reason. The idea to inherit the default direction from the parent and only flip if there's not enough space sounds good. If we do that, we might consider letting the arrows point in the default direction: +---------+ \ | >|+-----------+ \ | +-------+| >| \ | | || >| \ +----+| <|| | \ | || <|| | \ | <|| |+-----------+ \ | <|+-------+ \ +----+ \
Urg, ascii art in html forms considered harmful...
I have made the submenus inherit the direction from their parent as long as possible now. Leaving open to meditate flipping arrows.
closing out ancient bugs