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RE: File menu changes (suggestions) / Options menu


From: David Reitter
Subject: RE: File menu changes (suggestions) / Options menu
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 16:51:21 +0100

Drew Adams wrote:

1. "Save Buffer As" runs command `write-file'. Where's the beef - er -
"buffer"?
2. "Save (current buffer)" runs command `save-buffer'.
3. "Close (current buffer)" runs command `kill-this-buffer'.
4. "Revert Buffer" runs command `revert-buffer'.

It doesn't matter what command names are behind the menu entries. Some of the command names seem inconsistent anyways, and a user doesn't necessarily care for command names. A user wants to save the current buffer. She can either save it, or save it "as" something. Hence, the menu entries should be "Save" and "Save as...". If we need to inform the user how to do the same thing with keyboard commands, we do so afterwards. If the user wants to access the stuff programmatically (very rare), he can always do a C-h k.

So "New File" says that a new file is created? Yes, it says that, but it
tells not the truth: no file is created by this operation.

The version I'm working with has "Open" (not New), and if it is "New" (but means find-file), it should be renamed. "new" creates something new, i.e. an empty buffer - and doesn't load an existing file. The problem may be that find-file can also create a new file. If you want to stick with that, rename the entry to "New/Open..."

> 5. Move all of the window and frame stuff to a new menu, "Frames".

Not good: we have a crammed menu bar already, adding more top- level
    items would only make things worse with no real advantage.

Agreed. But 1) this stuff has little to do with "File"; 2) use of a
"Windows" menu, having a similar purpose, is common in other apps; 3) I think it is likely that we will have more frame and window commands to add
to a Frames menu in the future.

I agree with both of you. I would suggest to stick it in the Buffers menu. There is room for it, and we have a "Frames" submenu in the Buffers menu when there is more than one frame. It would nicely correlate to the "Windows" menu existing in standard GUIs, but because so many people work with a single frame and switch between buffers, it makes sense to stick to the menu title "buffers" and have frames as a submenu, and split/unsplit on the top-level hierarchy, separated with a line separator.

Can I make another suggestion?
Some items in the Options menu are buffer-local (truncate-lines), while most are global. It would be smart to separate the two kinds of items. I'm not sure about the "case-insensitive search". In Aquamacs, I have moved it to the Edit/search sub-menu.

It would also be good if someone could work on making "Set Font/ Fontset" a proper sub-menu (this might be Carbon specific, I don't know).




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