RE: Contextual Menu suggestion

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

At 1:39 PM -0500 2/27/02, Craig B Upright wrote:

>In the interest of keeping the Help menu as short as possible, the entire
>content of this file was moved into a section of "Extending Alpha".

Ah, cool.

>Perhaps rather than trying to pass these items along, which can get kind
>of messy, perhaps the contextualMenuHook could place them in a global
>variable that could then be easily accessed by any CM Menu/Item that
>wants/needs to use the info.  This variable would obviously be reset each
>time the CM is built, so that the CM Menu/Item would always be dealing
>with the current relevant info.

I'm not seeing offhand what's messy about passing them, but I have no 
problem with making them globally available. I can't imagine ever 
dealing with more than one context at a time, so I don't think there 
would be any reentrancy problems.

>All of the window/mode specific stuff,
>however, which is more contextual, is on by default.  Except for the 'Open
>Windows' module, which should probably be turned off initially.

Fair enough.

>btw, I've been looking at other applications to try to figure out how they
>deal with the CM, esp wrt the 'text' in 'contextual', and haven't found many
>(any) good examples.

BBEdit is quite good (6.5 anyway; I don't know about Lite). Look, for 
example, in HTML documents, where the contextual menu gives you the 
attributes appropriate for the selected tag. Yes, I know Johan does 
something very similar if you command click on a tag... which should 
make it pretty easy to implement a cool HTML CM.

CodeWarrior Pro 6+ isn't bad (although it's a little odd).

>I use the Finder Pop extension (which this packages
>plays nice with)

Yep. Turly was good enough to fix a bug in FP that Alpha uncovered.

>One challenge here is that we already have command double click, which is very
>text-oriented, and the HTML mode makes excellent use of the option click title
>bar -- including stuff that could be easily incorporated into the CM.  Alpha
>is way ahead of the game in giving text-related support !!

I agree. Ideally, in most cases, I think we should coopt (to 
supplement, not replace (which is the profoundly aggravating route 
that Metrowerks chose)) Alpha's context sensitive command clicking 
routines.

>Got it.  Again, although these are currently discarded, they could be
>easily made available as described above.

Agreed.

>One thing that I noticed is that if I put an 'alertnote "here"' line in any
>of the build procs, I get the alertnote multiple times, the exact number
>depending on how many items are to be included in the CM. I don't have any
>idea why this is the case, but it seems like menus are being built and
>rebuilt and rebuilt.

Weird. Do let me know if you think it's the core doing this.
-- 


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