[rox-devel] Update to the application-specific menus patch

[Diego Z. <za...@ce...>]

Hi,

As the last pending item in my "patches to ROX-Filer" queue that I had to 
clean up and submit, I have uploaded an update to the application-specific 
patch. Please see patch #103115 in the sourceforge patches page.

This patch (against CVS as of 01/26/2001) adds application-specific
menus to ROX-Filer. If an application has a menu defined, its entries
appear above the standard menu when the application is right-clicked,
whether on the pinboard, panels, or on a filer window.

The menu is defined in a file called AppMenu in the application
directory. Its format is:

entryid	    Menu text

Each line defines one menu entry. When an entry from the application
menu is selected, the corresponding AppRun is invoked with the option
"--entryid", where "entryid" is the one corresponding to the item
selected. It is up to AppRun to correctly interpret the option and do
something.

The application menus are re-read automatically when they change, so
the application can potentially modify the menu file, and the changes
will be seen by ROX-Filer.

For examples of ROX applications that use this feature, see my
Trashcan, XEmacs and LaTeX applications at
http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/homes/zamboni/rox/. In particular, the
XEmacs wrapper is an example of an AppRun that modifies its menu on
the fly, to keep a list of recently-opened files.

Some notes:

- In contrast to the first version of this patch, copies of the menus
  are not cached for each application that has a menu
  defined. Instead, only the app-specific items are stored, and the
  corresponding menu (filer, pinboard or panel) is modified on the
  fly. The AppMenu items are cached in appmenu_cache (see appmenu.h)

- I'm not sure about the usefulness of showing applicaton-specific
  items on filer windows. In my experience, app-specific menus are
  more useful on the pinboard and panels only.

  I was thinking of having an additional option for toggling showing
  app-specific menus on filer windows. Any thoughts?

- Sub-menus and separators cannot be defined for now in app-specific
  menus, although it shouldn't be too hard to add.

- Note that the name of the menu file has changed from
  AppMenuStatic.txt (in the first version of this patch) to AppMenu.

- In the first version of this patch, the application directory itself 
  was used as the key to the appmenu_cache. Now the menu file is used, 
  so it detects changed to the menu more reliably.

- Thomas mentioned the possibility of migrating ROX configuration
  files to XML format. If and when that happens all across ROX-Filer,
  I will modify the format of AppMenu to XML.


ABOUT DYNAMIC MENUS

I initially thought that dynamic menus would be a good idea. Now I'm
not so sure for a number of reasons. If they are found to be useful,
they could be implemented using some special syntax in the AppMenu
file (instead of a different file, as I had initially
suggested). Thoughts on this issue are welcome.

I will welcome all feedback on the usefulness and implementation of
this patch.

Enjoy,
--Diego Zamboni
  za...@pu...