vm team mailing list archive

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 11:08 AM, Uday S Reddy <u.s.reddy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Uday Reddy writes:
>
> > My memory is that we used to have menu buttons "[VM]" and "[Emacs]".
> > It is still that way for XEmacs.
> >
> > The "[Emacs]" button was moved to the Help menu in VM 8.0.8 according
> > to the NEWS file, but the "[VM]' button was retained on the menubar
> > and it is probably broken for GTK users.
>
> It also occurs to me that it would be nice if we can implement this
> modularly so that we can pick either menubar buttons or menus,
> depending on the toolkit in operation.  Rob seems to have thought that
> buttons don't work in Win32, but they work fine.  They also work fine
> in the "X toolkit" used on my CentOS machine at work.
>
>
>From what I've been able to determine, top-level menu 'buttons' will work
under wn32, X Lucid and I think GNUStep. They do not work under GTK+ or NS.
Don't know about other toolkits.

The difficulty about a modular approach so that we have different behavior
based on the toolkit is that I'm not sure how easily you can detect each
different toolkit at run-time. I'm also concerned we may be just adding
complexity and extra code (= extra bugs) for little real benefit. I'd rather
we had the same/consistent interface on all systems. Apart from less code to
maintain, it gives a consistent feel regardless of the build you are using.
This would mean not having top-level menu buttons as at least two toolkits
don't support it.  Personally, I think in the last 15 years, there has only
been one time I used the option to get the emacs menu bar, so maybe I'm not
able to see the real advantage of having the option as a top-level button
compared to having it as an action under a sub-menu.

Tim

P.S. Another thought may be to have this as a toolbar item? I personally
turn off toolbars, but maybe that would be a better solution as all toolkits
support toolbars and essentially, this is what a top-level menu button is.