unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Bassett <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 14/06/11 22:00, Florian Diesch wrote:
> Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 
> 
>> Niklas Rosenqvist wrote on 19/05/11 10:15:
>>>
>>> 2011/5/19 Florian Diesch <diesch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>> ...
>>>> It's about impossible to use "focus follows mouse" and multiple
>>>> windows with the global menu, which makes it unusable for me.
>>>
>>> This is a great example for when the global menu isn't such a great
>>> idea as everyone thought before Natty.
>>> ...
>>
>> That isn't correct. I specified how it could work with focus follows
>> mouse in May 2010, months before Natty even had a name.
>> <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MenuBar#focus-follows-mouse>
> 
> That's much better than what we have now but still far from being a real
> solution as it would give me the wrong menu for a window I focused by
> moving the mouse to it. And the point of using "focus follows mouse" is
> that I can select a window with the mouse *without* clicking on it.
> 
> 
>    Florian

What about just having the menu bar consistently appearing with the
window buttons: i.e. in the panel when the window is maximised, and on
the title bar on non-maximised windows -- appearing when the mouse goes
over the title bar.

This leaves the issue of how to grab the title bar of a non-maximised
window in order to move it, which I would assume to be an easier problem
to design/resolve; my naive suggestions would be to either

1) to not activate menu drop downs until mouse-up (so you can grab the
the menu bar/title bar without issue and drag the menu around), or

2) only make the menu appear when you mouse over the left hand half of
the title bar.

Once the menu appears due to mouse over the title bar, have it persist
for a certain amount of time (500ms, 1sec or something) if the mouse
pointer leaves the menu bar.

Or am I barking up the wrong tree (or is this a suggestion seen many
times before... I tried searching the archives, but did not find this
suggestion).

Cheers!

Matthew