Re: Contextual Menu suggestion

[Jon G. <jg...@hi...>]

At 12:41 AM -0500 2/27/02, Craig B Upright wrote:
>I have a suggested update for Alpha8's contextual menu, which you can
>find here:

I did the base CM implementation in Alpha8 and I really like what 
you've done here, Craig (sorry I didn't write back when you wrote to 
me originally; I've been traveling and I've been swamped at work and 
my laptop's been on the fritz and my dog ate my homework and...)

A few comments:

I wrote up some very rudimentary help for CMs and checked it into CVS 
about three months ago... and then Vince evidently removed it about 
two months ago... it can be found at
<http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/alphatcl/Help/Attic/Contextual%20Menu%20Help>. 
Hopefully this answers some of your private questions to me about why 
things are passed the way they are... it's because that's the way the 
CMM does things. I'm all for hiding the gory details of the ToolBox 
from Alpha's Tcl developers, but I don't want to hide the power in 
the process.

Since there are only about twelve lines of my code left, please feel 
much, /much/ more than welcome to list yourself as maintainer. 8^)

That should be "contextualMenu.tcl" on line 263 in the help {} clause.

I'm a bit uncomfortable with some of the items you include in the 
menu. The whole point of the contextual menu is that it's 
/contextual/. As such, recent files, open windows, and such seem 
inappropriate. I'm not saying it's not convenient and end users are 
certainly welcome to activate anything they feel makes life easier, 
but I think by default we should be careful to do things "right". The 
HIG doesn't have a tremendous amount to say about CMs, but I know 
I've read better guidance somewhere; we should strive to limit the 
number of items and make them truly contextual. Simply duplicating a 
bunch of global menus in the CM would not be in the spirit of the 
thing as I understand it. I'm certainly open to debate this, though 
(acknowledging, of course, that my position won't shift one iota and 
I will ruthlessly inflict my will on others).

>This version takes the idea of 'context' to refer to both the current
>open window and that window's mode to dynamically build the pop-up.

Entirely appropriate. The window and its mode are certainly part of 
the context.

>I've
>made no attempt to make the text surrounding either the cursor or the
>mouse position part of the 'context', although there is built in support
>for any mode to do so via a '<mode> Utils' submenu.

Careful here. The location of the context click is /not/ necessarily 
the current selection. The only way to know what context to consider 
is to examine the $pos and $selectionDesc arguments to 
contextualMenu::contextualMenu, which are presently discarded.

>I've
>attempted to streamline the building of the CM menu as much as possible,
>I'm not sure if more can be done in the core to speed it up.

Let me play with it some more and I'll see if I have any insights on 
how to accelerate things.

-- 


   Jonathan E. Guyer
   <http://www.his.com/jguyer/>