GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 465316
Rework of main window's menu
Last modified: 2012-07-09 07:03:13 UTC
As proposed in many bugs menus should be reworked. 1) Contact context menu don't fit in "Edit" menu 2) Menu that change dynamically depending on the item selected in the contact list is bad, we should set sensitivity instead. 3) "Show disconnected contacts" has nothing to do in "Discuss" menu 4) ... We should think about a complet reordering of menus at once instead of discussing each item in a different bug. Propositions are welcomed!
*** Bug 459556 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 459554 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 459163 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 459558 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I don't know if this note in the TODO is still relevant: "- Remove Quit option everywhere, empathy is a session service and shouldn't be leaved." If it is, I think we could have a menu like this: Chat | Edit | View | Help Chat would have submenus: Contact (grayed out if we're not selecting a contact, maybe we could also call it with the nickname of the currently selected contact), Group (as for contact) and Room (grayed out if current protocol does not support rooms). Also "Add Contact" would make sense here. Edit would have these entries: Accounts, Personal Information and Preferences. View would have: View previous conversations, Show offline contacts and the following from "Appearance" part in the General section of Preferences: Show Avatars, Show compact contact list, Sort Contact List by. I don't think "Show smileys as images" belongs here. "New Message" is really useless imho (and here it does not seem to make any action), so I would drop it completely, as we can send a message to a contact with double-click or Chat->Contact->Chat. Anyway, if we also want to keep the Quit option, it could stay in Chat menu and in the context menu on the tray icon. What do you think?
A little addition: we can think also of adding a toolbar in the lowest part of the window like iChat does, with a "+" button to add contacts and options to start text/voice/video chat (when they will be implemented of course).
Ok, so what Cosimo suggested is: - Chat --> Contact --> Add Contact --> Room --> Group --> Quit - Edit --> Accounts --> Personal Information --> Preferences - View --> View previous conversations --> Show offline contacts --> Show Avatars --> Show compact contact list --> Sort Contact List by: ----> By Name ----> By State - Help I'd suggest to use "Display" instead of "View" as most GNOME app use it. I think the "New Chat" entry make sense and should be in the "Chat" menu.
Empathy master now has a "View" menu.
The problem with a new top menu item is the conflict with the typical narrow UI Empathy has, the window must be enlarged to match the menu. It may not be a problem in English with short labels (Chat, Edit, View, Help, how convenient they are all four letters long). See for example the UI (2.24) in Japanese: http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.24/figures/rnusers.empathy.png.ja I agree the menu needs work, but perhaps it should come with some rethinking of the main window, to abandon the "narrow window" idea.
Or there has to be a way to make the window go smaller than the menu bar. (Pidgin can be resized smaller than its menu bar for instance).
What about a Show/hide menubar action? In conjuction with Cosimo's idea of a little toolbar with most common actions (and maybe with some more action exposed in the contextual menu) could be a way to make the window resizeable while keeping important functionality still usable.
This menu has been removed.