Menu changed from inline to cascading

Well well, how about this for something different!

We are indebted to Raul Suarez, 'rarsa' in the Puppy Forum, who back in 2006 wrote a little C program to convert XDG menu specification files to JWM window manager format. You can find those XDG menu files at /usr/share/applications and /usr/share/desktop-directories, and menu structure files at /etc/xdg. Raul also wrote converters for some other window managers.

Raul's creations live on today, as PET package 'xdg-puppy', and this is used by all pups and derivatives. Found here for EasyOS:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/packages/pet/pet_packages-buster/xdg-puppy-0.7.8-pyro64.pet

His source tarball is here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/source/oe/pyro/xdg_puppy-0.7.8.tar.gz

Back in 2006 I did experiment with a cascading menu, however decided that it is nicer to see everything "all at once", inline. That is what Puppy, Quirky and EasyOS users have been seeing up to now.

However, sometimes new users have balked when faced with such long lists in each sub-menu. Yes, I can see an advantage to neatly categorising the sub-menus, even though it will take extra mouse actions to get to a particular app. So today decided why not, give cascading menus a go, so here it is:

To get the menus to cascade rather than be in-line, the *.menu files in /etc/xdg/menus had to be edited, changing inline="true" to inline="false", plus some other things were modified, such as moving some apps and fixing some sub-titles.

Expect this in the next release, probably 2.4. If users like it, it will stay. 

Tags: easy