[Denemo-devel] Custom Menu Items

[Richard Shann]

Attached is a screenshot of Denemo. Two of the menus are pinned-up, and
you can see on them two items which do not exist in the source. One is
Guitar Fingerings and the other Multi Measure Rests.
How did they get there? Well, you can see there is also a new menu
Favorites, which has an add favorite menuitem. With this you can add a
menuitem anywhere in the system, giving it a name, tooltip and LilyPond
text of your choice. (You can also add a shortcut). When you click on
the new item, you are offered the LilyPond text to edit (e.g.
MultiMeasure rests require a time signature and number of measures) and
the action then inserts that LilyPond.
What's the point? Well, if you put into the menu system everything
everybody could ever want, no one would ever find anything.
Instead, you choose from a gallery of canned favorites, or create a new
one and put it in the menu system where you will find it. You add a
tooltip to remind yourself how to use it (and you submit it to the
denemo.org website to go into the online gallery).
There is a nice development path ahead here: you can describe how to
present the LilyPond insert on the Denemo score area, so as to get good
feedback as to what you have entered, you can parameterise the LilyPond
so that when you click on (press keyboard shortcut for) Guitar Fingering
you have a spinner to take the finger number, and much much more...
At the moment I've just got this working, integrated with Jean-Rene`s
shortcut manager (so your new command appears in the alphabetical order
in his table). There is no save, no load from gallery, no restore last
sessions menu items (with the last of these it is uesless of course!)
But it will work, and would enable us to relegate some of the less
popular menu items to a gallery (from whence those interested could
fetch them to keep in their own profile, ~/.denemo)
Richard

customizedMenu.png
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