GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 787337
Provide hint after hiding Menu Bar how to show it
Last modified: 2021-05-19 12:27:50 UTC
Tonight, I hit "View > Layout > Display menu bar" by mistake when trying to turn off the toolbar. The hilarious part is that the menubar can only be toggled on/off from... the menubar. There is no undo action for this, and no keyboard shortcut (but then one could argue having a keyboard shortcut for this would be dangerous, the other way around...). So here's a proposal: instead of nuking it completely when the user toggles it off, hide the menubar widget but show a GtkMenuButton widget packed at the end of the searchbar (which is always shown no matter what, and not possible to toggle off) on the far right, and associate the same menu model object to it than to the menubar. Yes it's "ugly" to set such a complex menu model into a MenuButton, but it's a safer approach... and actually sort of appealing to those who would like to occasionally have access to the menu without eating the whole horizontal space at all times. Reference: https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkMenuButton.html
Thanks for a bug report. The key to use is Alt, as anywhere else when trying to access menu with keyboard. It's also the approach used by Firefox, for example. Just press it for a bit and then the menu bar will be shown. There had been some obstacle with gtk+ in keeping the menu open when the Alt is released, thus doing something like Alt+E, which opens the Edit menu, is one of the ways to have the menu shown (it is kept shown when there is any submenu opened). Maybe you are just not used to the Alt key. I'm afraid there is no good place for the menu button, having it on toolbar, which can be also hidden, doesn't solve anything and because evolution explicitly disables header bars, then that always-shown-menu-button would do just the opposite what the hiding of the menu bar is for (aka it would eat vertical space).
I meant the search toolbar (the one with "Display: [All messages] Search: [ ] in [current folder] * " where * would be the menubutton; not the main toolbar... it wouldn't eat any vertical space since it can't be turned off, so maybe worth a shot?
To be honest, with a lack of enough visual indication about active searches I begun to keen to hide the search bar when it's not used, just like the current trend in other (not only GNOME) applications is.
Ah, I didn't know you had the "slide-in" contextual global searchbar in the plans, that changes everything! (in which case I guess the case I was making in bug #786852 is valid as well :) If so, I have an idea then, which will be easier to implement anyway. Instead of the menubutton, when turning off the menubar show an infobar telling users that they can access the menubar again "by pressing and holding the Alt key on the keyboard." In addition to that, document this in the user manual (at least in 3.24 it wasn't written)
Note that it seems the current approach still is problematic because it doesn't work at all for me under Wayland (bug #787411)
(In reply to Jean-François Fortin Tam from comment #4) > Instead of the menubutton, when turning off the menubar show an infobar > telling users that they can access the menubar again "by pressing and > holding the Alt key on the keyboard." In addition to that, document this in > the user manual I agree adding this to the User Documentation (new bug can be filled), but the infobar is something unusual for any other application. It's not a problem, it can even contain a button to "Show Menu Bar", but it's unusual. I may eventually do it, thus I keep this bug opened.
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new bug report ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.