The BunsenLabs Menu

Pinhead · 2023-04-02 10:30:37

Arcolinux has a switch to icons in the menu in openbox.

...and installing programs in the menu is unnecessary, IMHO. Since then, Synaptic has...

Last edited by Pinhead (2023-04-02 10:37:14)

deleted0 · 2023-04-02 14:18:42

Pinhead wrote:

...and installing programs in the menu is unnecessary, IMHO. Since then, Synaptic has...

^ You've shown, to me anyway, to be a fairly bright and clever fellow; I don't understand your post and I don't want to miss anything good.

---

I think a root discussion might be where does BL go from here. And how does that effect the menu.

BL's core audience has been the more technical wordsmith. If i have that wrong, for sure, enlighten me. I see that segment shrinking, or at least growing slowly compared to other user types.

Who is(are) BL future audience(s)? Does it need to change?

IMHO, most BL users can and will change to menu to suit. So much of this discussion may be moot. To catch new users of any caliber, all of BL should be as attractive as suits our ethos. In lots of small ways:

BL needs an editor. And as luck would have it, I'm a much better editor than original content creator. Thankfully, we have hhh for that.

In the image above the divider says so much about how the menu is organized. The first time I used this menu, I clicked on Manuals wondering why it was right justified. Now it more obvious it's a title for a new section.

Above (and after) all other changes, Bl Menu needs polish from someone/group with an eye for design. And why do I think I have something to say? Twenty plus years doing kitchen & bath remodels and fabric & furniture installs for a popular decorator who pounded design into my head every day. If I ever hang another curtain or lay another carpet again it will be too soon.

OT:

Excuse a bit of color;
He liked to design bedrooms with quilted walls and ceilings. He'd find rolls of a fabric he liked, have them printed with a pattern, many of which he created. Then the fabric would be quilted.

That's when I'd get them. Cut runs to length, stitch them together to make a panel for a wall. Wonderful technique for ceilings. Make your panel 15 foot oversize in both directions. Cut a 15 foot hole in the center and bring it closed with a drawstring. Cut your runs carefully and save all that fabric in the center. Makes a wonderful, quiet atmosphere.

Like this one, only tighter fabric is traditional.

8bit

edit: I shrink the images all I know how.

Last edited by deleted0 (2023-04-02 16:49:59)

Pinhead · 2023-04-02 16:15:34

I think that the offer to install the program in the menu is unnecessary. E.g. "Install Gimp"
Sorry for my english.

DeepDayze · 2023-04-03 02:56:14

I love the new menu layout and maybe why not have something to make it easy for people to change their menu layouts. Jgmenu is great and perhaps the dev can fix that annoyance by perhaps having a config item for toggling last remembered selection or something.

johnraff · 2023-04-03 05:12:25

Thanks again for all this high-grade input al! I'll be in with some comments of my own soon, but there's something else I want to work on today.

eight.bit.al wrote:

I think a root discussion might be where does BL go from here. And how does that effect the menu.
BL's core audience has been the more technical wordsmith. If i have that wrong, for sure, enlighten me. I see that segment shrinking, or at least growing slowly compared to other user types.
Who is(are) BL future audience(s)? Does it need to change?
IMHO, most BL users can and will change to menu to suit. So much of this discussion may be moot. To catch new users of any caliber, all of BL should be as attractive as suits our ethos.

A very important topic, with lots of things to be said. Could you start a new thread for this?
We ought to get a new road map drawn up before Carbon.

deleted0 · 2023-04-03 12:09:32

DeepDayze wrote:

I love the new menu layout

Well, technically, it's a menu made for the way I'd use it. Doubt it works for anyone else.

perhaps the dev can fix that annoyance

Might be as easy as resetting a variable to nill when jgmenu is run.

8bit

johnraff · 2023-04-04 02:58:45

Re: jgmenu "remembering" the last used item - I don't personally find that annoying at all. But anyway, the person in charge there is @malm: he's the only one who could change that behaviour, if he were convinced it was necessary.

or1o9 · 2023-04-05 09:18:29

johnraff wrote:

Debian Bookworm will be out soon, so for Boron let's incorporate changes that are both easy to apply and uncontroversial.
Lots more can follow in Carbon.

This.

Thank you @johnraff for the write up about the thoughts behind the setup of the menu, appreciated. I am quite content of how it is now, but I have an adapt and adjust strategy when it comes to the menu so I am ok with changes.

deleted0 · 2023-04-06 13:49:04

Hey gang, where do we stand with this? Anything to do before Boron?

8bit

johnraff · 2023-04-07 05:21:03

^8bit you've given us much food for thought already. Give me a bit longer because I'm tangled up in other stuff, but I think your suggestions about reordering items, separators etc should be able to go in Boron no problem.

The wider stuff like the role of the auto Applications submenu, let's discuss that after Boron. With any luck we'll have ~2 years before the next Debian is breathing down our necks.

eight.bit.al wrote:

To catch new users of any caliber, all of BL should be as attractive as suits our ethos. In lots of small ways

Yes! I absolutely agree that attractive appearance is a key point. It really contributes to productivity. Just like working in a comfortable, but simple and elegant, office. No fancy drapes hanging about the place. Tradition that goes back to CrunchBang.

deleted0 · 2023-04-11 13:35:57

I was preparing a medley of right-click menus to help expand horizons, especially mine. But I got bored with that. Here's a few:

Click image for full screenshot.

Sparky Linux - Openbox

#!++

Xbuntu's latest minimal beta

Trying to make the BL Menu more traditional and keep what makes it BL special, seems the menu is getting a bit long...

Here you see I'm working on getting the extensive BL Help Menu working; some magic I haven't grokked yet.

It's just my humble opinion the BL menu has been tortured over and over. Some of it on purpose:

"It's a hack to avoid showing the "desktop-directories" in the root menu."

https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=6539

If I understood correctly, serious menu choices were made on account of the 7 reviewers who did a poor job of it; ahead of user convenience.

It's been a good time getting to know jgmenu. I won't use it; the pre-highlighted, left-over menu choice is a deal breaker for me.

Anything I can do to help with the BL Menu, one has only to ask.

8bit

Last edited by deleted0 (2023-04-11 13:58:43)

deleted0 · 2023-04-11 14:39:17

And just for fun:

Rhino - Ubuntu Rolling

(has a menu)

8bit

johnraff · 2023-04-12 01:10:05

eight.bit.al wrote:

It's just my humble opinion the BL menu has been tortured over and over. Some of it on purpose:
"It's a hack to avoid showing the "desktop-directories" in the root menu."
https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=6539
If I understood correctly, serious menu choices were made on account of the 7 reviewers who did a poor job of it; ahead of user convenience.

With respect, I don't think you've understood correctly:
*) Damo wrote that tutorial in 2020, the decision to move "Applications" lower down in the menu was made for Beryllium, in 2022.
*) Yes, a factor in that decision was the poor understanding shown by several reviewers - we took that as an indication of how first-time users might use the menu.
*) As you've found, the BL menu is quite easily tweaked, so experienced users can get it however they like.
*) Some developers were against having an auto-generated menu at all.
*) The "hack" Damo referred to is nothing to do with the position where "Applications" appears, it's about getting the contents in a sub-menu, not included directly in the root menu (which would make it very long).
*) I think user convenience is better served by using the "System" and "Preferences" submenus we've made. As I've already said "Applications" is not seen as the first go-to but as a fallback, because of various issues.

That said, there's a good discussion to be had about the role of the auto-generated menu, but the outcome could be a fairly major restructuring, so could we please have this discussion after the Boron release? If we want to get it out reasonably promptly, there just isn't time right now.

Last edited by johnraff (2023-04-12 01:18:13)

johnraff · 2023-04-12 01:16:12

eight.bit.al wrote:

It's been a good time getting to know jgmenu. I won't use it; the pre-highlighted, left-over menu choice is a deal breaker for me.

Why? I don't get this at all. Personally, I hardly ever notice that highlighting, which was meant (I think) to be a convenience. Why don't you send an issue to the project - if the consensus among users goes that way, maybe the devs will revert that feature: https://github.com/jgmenu/jgmenu/issues

johnraff · 2023-04-12 01:24:05

eight.bit.al wrote:

Anything I can do to help with the BL Menu, one has only to ask.

Thanks! As soon as I've finished with BLOB (which took longer than expected ) I plan to visit your menu suggestions and implement the easy ones for Boron. (One possible tricky one is menu icons.) But I think we've got enough to chew on for now - can we leave the bigger discussion to Carbon?

If you're still up for helping us out, maybe you could drop a response to my question on the roadmap? https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic … 36#p127036

Or talk to @hhh about the Boron theming (which is out of my area of competence)?

Last edited by johnraff (2023-04-12 01:42:22)

johnraff · 2023-04-15 09:23:06

eight.bit.al wrote:

fix icons, if I leave them on.

hhh wrote:

@al, leave icons on, for what my opinion is worth. Nice!

Icons in the Boron menu?

Interesting topic.
Icons can be very easily switched on or off by editing this line in ~/.config/jgmenu/jgmenurc:

icon_size           = 0

Change the icon size to 10 or 12 or 15...
I find big icons a bit garish and if I were going to use them myself would set it to 10 or even 8, but peoples' tastes vary...
Whether the plain #! style menu looks more elegant than one with icons... maybe depends on what theme you're using it with.

There is a workflow gain with icons though - they can make it easier to spot the menu item you're looking for.

So... how about having icons with the default Boron theme? It's easy enough for users to switch to a different theme with BLOB and get back to an iconless menu. Or edit jgmenurc.

If we did this, though, there would be some work to do.
My testing Boron menu with 12px icons:

You can see there are lots of gaps like missing teeth. They would all have to be filled in with some suitable icon that's available in popular icon themes - or at least Papirus.

Whatever we do, jgmenu does not display icons in pipemenus (but opens an icon-sized blank space), so maybe the appearance would be more balanced if we had no icons in the submenus at all? That would still leave icons in the Applications> submenus though.

Opinions??

deleted0 · 2023-04-15 16:24:48

Done this many times; the hunt for or create the missing icons.

If icons then a well designed set. Most icon sets look like each individual icon was designed by a separate committee.

8bit

Spread some joy in the world; we really need it.

Last edited by deleted0 (2023-04-15 16:26:52)

DeepDayze · 2023-04-15 20:54:20

johnraff wrote:

Whatever we do, jgmenu does not display icons in pipemenus (but opens an icon-sized blank space), so maybe the appearance would be more balanced if we had no icons in the submenus at all? That would still leave icons in the Applications> submenus though.
Opinions??

Perhaps open a feature request with the jgmenu dev to add something like an arrow icon (or make it possible to set any icon) to pipemenu entries? That might be a good idea.

Last edited by DeepDayze (2023-04-15 20:55:16)

johnraff · 2023-04-18 06:46:34

The subject of pipemenu icons has come up - I think @malm intended to enable them, but hasn't had time:
https://github.com/jgmenu/jgmenu/issues/145

user wrote:

Is there a reason why there are no icons in pipe menus?

developer wrote:

No - just the dev time to implement.

However, with Wayland will come the need to adopt a new window manager. The obvious candidate right now is labwc whose main developer is the same @malm. The labwc menu is xml and looks very similar to the openbox menu: https://labwc.github.io/labwc-menu.5.html
https://github.com/labwc/labwc/issues/9 … -950205059

That suggests to me that jgmenu's development might already be winding down...
If @malm is reading this maybe he can comment, but anyway I'm backing off on my plans to write more jgmenu-syntax pipemenus, at least until the future is a bit clearer.

johnraff · 2023-04-18 06:54:33

eight.bit.al wrote:

Done this many times; the hunt for or create the missing icons.
If icons then a well designed set. Most icon sets look like each individual icon was designed by a separate committee.
https://i.ibb.co/F58tfbs/mx-forum-scree … d-menu.png

That looks very nice.
What icon theme is it?

#21 2023-04-02 10:30:37

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#22 2023-04-02 14:18:42

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#23 2023-04-02 16:15:34

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#24 2023-04-03 02:56:14

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#25 2023-04-03 05:12:25

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#26 2023-04-03 12:09:32

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#27 2023-04-04 02:58:45

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#28 2023-04-05 09:18:29

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#29 2023-04-06 13:49:04

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#30 2023-04-07 05:21:03

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#31 2023-04-11 13:35:57

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#32 2023-04-11 14:39:17

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#33 2023-04-12 01:10:05

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#34 2023-04-12 01:16:12

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#35 2023-04-12 01:24:05

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#36 2023-04-15 09:23:06

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#37 2023-04-15 16:24:48

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#38 2023-04-15 20:54:20

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#39 2023-04-18 06:46:34

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

#40 2023-04-18 06:54:33

Re: The BunsenLabs Menu

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