since Dia compiled so nicely I've been trying out a few ideas some of which are simple and others that I haven't got working yet but I would appreciate help with (help, advice towards figuring it out myself as much as possible)
http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/dia/menus.c I'll provide proper patches later when I've got the ideas sorted out the gist of it is, more keybindings [1], some renaming [2] and more menu items to take advantage of the features of Dia I have only recently begun to appreciate [3]. [1] I wanted to add keybindings using some of the Function keys (F8, F9) but the keybindings for the toolbox seem to be in a differnt context to the bindings in the document window, so if the toolbox is out of focus they are not much use. This fits in with an idea I have that I would like to make the File and Help menus in the Toolbox and the Document Window more consistant with each other. I mentioned yesterday that I was hoping to have the recent files in both File menus, and although it could be be made optional I'd prefer to always put them in a submenu 'Open Recent' (like the Gimp does) and keep the file menu uncluttered. I haven't tried doing this yet but I hope it will be easy enough (dont laugh if it is trivial, these things are always easy in hindsight when you know how). Going against consistancy but following the Gnome Guidelines I added Preferences to the bottom of the edit menu and it feels comfortable (and i used the letter E as the mnemonic so that you can go Alt,E,E to quickly access the preferences even though the Gnome HIG has been misleading people to do it differently). I added a keybinding for Select, Connected Ctrl+Shift+T because it is similar to Transitive ctrl+T. Added Ctrl+R to Show Rulers but I need to lookup how to also allow Ctrl+Shift+R to try and placate Gimp users. Redraw F5 Select Invert Ctrl+I ... probably a few others I'm forgetting but I'll worry about that when I'm making proper patches. [2] I renamed Objects to just Object because that seems to be the convention when naming menus (File not Files, Image not Images, Layer not Layers). When I added the keybinding Ctrl+I for Invert it also appeared in the menu for the other 'Invert' so I figured I could get away with it by renaming the other Invert to Inverse. [3] Layers, I have turned around completely from not understanding how useful they can be to wanting to use them everywhere. I have been using Layers a lot with the Gimp, I wrote scripts to provide New Layer from Cut/Copy that I'm rather proud of which make it very quick and easy to create a new layer. Also Inkscape is working towards adding Layers like functionality and I took a closer look at Adobe Illustrator. I think more people would appreciate the Layers features if they had menu items, making them more discoverable and allow them to have convenient keybindings. "money for old rope". however I'm pretty clueless about how to get started on implenting the hooks and callbacks to the existing functionality. There is plenty of exisiting functionality, New Layer, Delete; Arrange Forwards, Backwards; Show All/None, Current Only, Invert; Layer properties (ie rename the layer). I should be able to figure out eventually how to add easier features like Duplicate Layer, New Layer from Cut/Copy, and Merge (hopefully very similar to grouping and ungrouping) (Alt+L is being used as shortcut for Tools/Line which would need to be changed but I'm sure Dia will have single letter bindings again whenever the text entry is overhauled). Hope these ideas are of interest and you can nudge me in the right direction with relevant examples and documentation on how to implement them. Please do let me know what you all think of the ideas good or bad. Sincerely Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ _______________________________________________ Dia-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dia-list FAQ at http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/faq.html Main page at http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia
