Global menu hiding breaks fitts law, requiring an extra mouse targetting
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ayatana Design |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
I quite like the switch to global menu and I think there are 3 arguments that can be made for it, in order of importance:
1. Saves vertical screen space, quite nice on laptops.
2. Easier to target things at the edges of the screen (Fitts law)
3. Personally I think its a little more visually attractive to not have menus cluttering my windows.
The hiding behavior however, essentially entirely negates the second argument. Now if I want to access, say the "view" menu, of my application
1. Move my mouse to the top of the screen
2. Recognize the location of the menu items
3. Move my mouse again to target the desired menu item.
In addition this last mouse move, is a bit of a clumsy one since it is a small item and it's not a long move.
If the global menu were always visible, not only would it remove steps/thought, but it would make the targeting easier as over a long mouse movement it's easier to hone in on a target.
Additionally from a purely aesthetic viewpoint, the truncation of application names (even short ones such as "Terminal") is a little surprising and doesn't seem to serve any purpose.
| Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote | #1 |
This is not a duplicate of bug 682788, which is about where menus appear on large screens, not about their default visibility. If the "desired change" described there was implemented, this bug would not be fixed.