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Re: C-h K and C-h F in the Help menu


From: Lennart Borgman
Subject: Re: C-h K and C-h F in the Help menu
Date: Sun, 21 May 2006 09:38:49 +0200
User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 (Windows/20060308)

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
Date: Sat, 20 May 2006 23:19:02 +0200
From: Lennart Borgman <address@hidden>
CC:  address@hidden

I recently got some comments about the help menu in CVS Emacs from a long term Emacs user and fan (+15 y usage). One of the comments were that there are too many things in the help menu.

For some value of ``too many'': we have 17 entries there.  Why is this
bad?  Each entry can be useful in specific situations.
It is a good question. As I understand it the complaints was from a user interface view. Such a view is a mixture of logical and psychological matters. Neither a logical or a psychological argument is then entirely useful on its own even if they on their own are completely valid.

At first sight one might think that the time to find something in a menu is proportional to the length of the menu. I think however that the time required rises much faster, but I have not read any research about this. As I said before one of the factors is probably the short term memory span. This means that clear grouping with horizontal lines will probably help (as soon as the user understands the grouping). In the process of trying to grasp the grouping it seems to me that there should be a big advantage in fewer items.

Submenus will reduce the number of items even if there is only two subitems and I believe that this will be helpful for the reasons I have tried to outline above.




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