On 27/03/12 15:50, Rohan Garg wrote:
To sum up, I'd like to hear your thoughts on removing either the
menubar or the toolbar. One of them *has* to go.
- Toolbars and Menubars are not the same thing.
Toolbar is something you can customize with the actions you use more
often, while Menubar is something that should allow you to use any
actions, even the ones that you removed from the toolbar. I don't want a
toolbar item to share my desktop because I never use it, but I want to
be able to do it without re-customizing the actions in my toolbar if I
need to.
- Toolbars take more space than Menubars
Toolbars usually have larger icons, larger fonts and show the text on
the side. On small screens (netbooks) that's really important. Moreover
menubars allows you to use the dbus-menu and that takes a lot less space
than a toolbar on very small screens. I don't think that dolphin wrench
stuff is exported to dbus-menu, but I'm still on 4.7 and the wrench icon
is not there yet, so I might be wrong. Anyway the wrench approach is
imho a menu with less options and an extra click, that you cannot be
sure to find in a certain place. If you are using the same icon for
something else it can cause confusion. There are other approaches
(search the blog posts about dbus-menu in oxygen decoration) that are a
lot better than the wrench one.
- It's not true that Toolbar is faster than Menubar
First of all, actions are hidden if the size of the window is too small,
so you have to click on the small arrow ">" on the right, moving the
mouse over a small arrow is a lot slower than moving it over a menu.
Realizing that an action is hidden because the toolbar is too small
takes even more time. A normal user will never click on that arrow
unless he knows what to expect from there, so he will never know that he
has more actions hidden there.
Finally there was this hud-like krunner that would allow you to remove
the menubar completely and to use just <Alt + r> and keep typing on the
keyboard, instead of moving the mouse and clicking on the menu item.
- Menubars are informative
Menubars show the shortcut for an action, toolbars don't. Users learn
new shortcuts from menus, and that speeds up their work. With toolbars
you will always have to click on them.
So my opinion is NO, both of them must stay, because they have 2
different roles in the user experience. You can hide the menu bar if you
don't like it (Settings > Show Menubar in the text-ui or <Ctrl + m> as I
just discovered by looking at it) or hide the toolbars, or even both if
you want.
Daniele
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