On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 12:05:58AM +0000, David Given wrote: > As such I would suggest having that first menu called 'File' --- yes, I > know it makes absolutely no sense abstraction-wise, but people still > instinctively look for it, even in an application which doesn't use > files. An application without File looks weird and alien. > > (And, yes, the second menu should be 'Edit'.) This is how Windows does it. On Mac OS X both are in a menu that has the same name as the application. There it makes sense, because the menubar is application-global. Under Linux (or at least Gnome), the preferences item seems to go in Tools > Options most of the time. Having a File menu in an application that manages no files is nonsense. Very few applications in Haiku does that. Terminal has a Terminal menu, Vision has an "icon" menu. Tracker for example has a File menu, with options to manage files. Also, some applications (Caya, DeskCalc, fRiSS) have no menubar at all. The File/Edit system works well for document windows, but still, it is not application-global. File > Close should close only the current document, not the whole application. To me, closing the application is disturbing : I did an action in a single window, the effect should be contained to that window. If I want to quit the whole application, I'd look in the deskbar entry for it (which has a "close all" button). The current situation is a bit different. This comes from the fact that a lot of apps are either : * Mac OS inspired: there the menubar is global, so it makes sense to have actions for the whole application in. * Windows inspired : there the interface uses MDI (Multiple Document in one window) paradigm, where the window IS the application and it has subwindows for documents. Again, the menubar is application-global. In Haiku, each Window is a Document (we even have a B_DOCUMENT_WINDOW look constant for that). A tracker window is a folder, an Icon-O-Matic window is an icon, a BePDF window is a PDF file, a MediaPlayer window is a media file, etc. There are some exceptions : Terminal is not document-centered for example, unless you consider a bash session as a document. Web+ allows tabs, but from the very beginning of it I heard plans of opening windows and stacking them with Stack&Tile (I did that for Netsurf and I think it works very well). Now, we can see that the apps that have an application menu (Terminal and Vision) are not document-centered apps. One last point as for the dekbar menu not being discoverable enough : as far as I know, people get more and more used to managing windows from Mac OS X dock or from Windows 7 taskbar which works very similar. So, this menu seems to be the usual way of doing things. Ubuntu switched to a dock-like system as well. So, it seems to me if we want to go with the mass, maybe we should look at the current version of what they do, not the 10 year old one. -- Adrien.