RE: IDE features: M-x find-grep

[Drew Adams]

> > More levels of menu is also inconvenient.  The general point is
> > still valid: we should have to design the best menu, not stuff
> > in all the commands that we think "beginners should see".
> 
> I think long menus are more inconvenient than deep menus.
> Currently we have overly long menu Tools (28 items!), so
> moving search related commands to Edit->Search will make the
> Tools menu shorter.

I was going to stay out of this one, but yes, I agree about Search. (And about
Tools having become a catch-all - everything, after all, is a tool.)

All Search stuff should be moved from Tools to a Search menu. I use a top-level
Search menu, and I have for decades.

Yes, I know that some of you have said that the menu-bar is not wide enough to
add a Search menu. In that case, leave it under Edit or sacrifice one of the
other top-level menus - move Buffers under File, for instance. Whatever.

The menu-bar is the main bottleneck for adding menus, so it is natural to add
submenus, at least at the menu-bar level. Yes, it is also bad to have menus that
are too shallow: zillions of submenus everywhere, so you have to cascade
multiple levels to get to things. As an example, Interleaf was notorious for
that.

It's about balance.

The decision of whether to add a menu or a menu item should be based on its
usefulness to users, not on whether the menus are already too crowded, too
numerous, or too deep. That is a phony argument; it just supports the menus and
items we have now, the status quo. Except in extreme limit conditions, menus can
accommodate a lot of submenus and menu items without impacting their usefulness.

On the other hand, yes, whether a menu or item is useful to users is not a
question of completeness either - there is no reason to add stuff just for
completeness, as Richard reminds us often.

Menus are an important way of structuring information. Operations that have
something in common are grouped together. This grouping makes menus a good
learning tool.

No, I don't expect to convince those who never use menus. But then, maybe they
shouldn't be the ones to decide what the menus should be. ;-)