GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 312600
Auto/Manual managing of input features in context menus
Last modified: 2006-03-10 09:41:41 UTC
Include (hidden) option in Gnome to hide the "Input Methods" and "Insert Unicode Control Character" options in context menus. Other information: While important and useful to non-English users, these menu options are unnecessary and confusing to those who will never use them. They are the more obtrusive because they appear on the most frequently invoked context menu (off any text area). As an American English user, I have never used these menus (and likely never will), and have had to give poor explanations to many new Gnome users asking why they show up with every attempt to paste text. The absence of these menus from American English installations of MS Windows (a very large user base) gives evidence to the fact that they are unnecessary.
Nothing to do with Pango
Owen, what happened to the "desktop-wide input method" patches that you were working on at some point ? They would address the first menu item, right ?
For the second menu item, Unicode control characters, I have a feeling that it should be context-sensitive. Based on the scripts used in the current paragraph or buffer, some characters are chosen to show up. If there are any characters, then the menu item would show. The list of these characters should be quite easy to expose form within Pango modules. Most of the characters in the current menu are only relevant in bidiretional scripts. ZWNJ and ZWJ are used in Arabic script and Indic scripts. Remains ZW-space, that doesn't really belong in that list IMO. An item to open up gucharmap instead would be more appropriate, but that again can be an option in the keyboard preferences capplet...
Good point. I wrote a plugin for gedit, BidiAssist, that helps user of languages with bidi-script to manage their paragraphs and embedded texts. Here are its page: <http://live.gnome.org/Gedit_2fPluginBidiAssist>. I wanted to add this to gedit's cvs, but Behdad noted that this feature should be in gtk+ or gtksourceview. IMHO he is right. For a Persian or Hebrew user, such menu entries is more more usable than Insert Character (that many users don't know what they are actually) and Input Methods. Also with discussed on #gedit about language/script support for plugins/features. Gedit cannot rely on document for menu entries. It's very confusing for users. All of these auto things should rely on locale. If user wants Persian feature to be available (automatically) every where, he should add Persian to his locale list. Then gedit can use locale list to turn on some plugins, Gtk+ can use locale list to add language/script based features in context menu, blah blah. Behdad: AFAIR, Noah added Gucharmap to Input Methods, but they removed it later. BTW, IMO all of this input related things should have an automatic behaviour based on locale list, and also configurable for special cases.
This is done in cvs HEAD.
Matthias, would you please point out what's in CVS HEAD exactly? I can't figure out easily looking at the ChangeLog. Thanks.