menu bars belong global at the top of the screen.

@icedquinn you mean, like this?

@pasture @icedquinn
So like Gnome3 tried to do it. From my experience, that becomes a pain in the but fast. Seems nice at first, but it's horrible when you have multiple smaller windows, and need to work with the menu in each of them. There's a lot more mouse movement and clicks suddenly taking place.

@alyx @pasture true but contemplate why is there a separate menu in each window.

the global menu at top is objectively superior and has been proven so scientifically. it has an infinitely low navigation distance (all 4 corners of the screen do, because slamming the mouse gets you there with no nimbleness), takes up less space, and the user always knows where it is.

if you see well designed mac software (and well, the amiga did it too) it’s not really a problem. it’s only a problem when you try to hack it like that one gtk patch but people still design the UI like donkeys.

@icedquinn @pasture
There's so much wrong there.

No, the navigation distance isn't low. The lowest navigation distance to the menu is gonna be lowest when it's in the window, cause you're most likely already working with said window.
Not to mention that if you are switching from window A to window B, you need to first click window B and then go up to the global menu to access the menu for window B. In normal local menu style, I just go with the mouse over window B and click it's menu directly.

>well designed mac software
Nothing in a mac is well designed. Stop believing the lies. Macs can literally have fans that are not even close to the heatsinks they're supposed to cool down.

@alyx @pasture navigation difficulty, sorry.

@icedquinn @pasture
You're still wrong.

@alyx @pasture i’m literally not.

Placing layout elements on the four edges of the screen allows for infinitely large targets in one dimension and therefore present ideal scenarios. As the user’s pointer will always stop at the edge, they can move the mouse with the greatest possible speed and still hit the target. The target area is effectively infinitely long along the movement axis. Therefore, this guideline is called “Rule of the infinite edges”. The use of this rule can be seen for example in MacOS, which places the menu bar always on the top left edge of the screen instead of the current programs windowframe.[28]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

@icedquinn @alyx @pasture just here to say keyboard shortcuts are infinitely better than whatever you are trying to solve with navigation problems

@user @icedquinn @pasture
True. But there's a limit to how many keyboard shortcuts you can have, remember and use.

@alyx @icedquinn @pasture yes
i think most applications allow you to press Alt+F and navigate to the other menus with arrow keys

@user @alyx @pasture

keyboard shortcuts are good for some small number of things; they degrade when you start using multiple modifier layers.

pie menus are good (objectively) because the motion to pick items becomes muscle memory but they degrade after something like ten items in total

search baskets are fucking great where you just hit space (blender) or command pallette (sublime) or m-x with a completer mode (emacs) and just type a few letters and it summons the menu item for you in a list.

menus are crap. if they are not alpha sorted they are considered a randomly ordered list which requires O(n) search. one paper suggested alphabetical menus would hilariously be O(log(n)) but also conceded people find it bizzare to see that.

@icedquinn @user @pasture
>a randomly ordered list which requires O(n) search
And this is why you fail. A human being is not a computer. We don't search through menus like a computer would. If you know what the software does, you'll already have a good chance of knowing in what menu you can find a particular option you're searching for. After you used the same menu a couple of times, you'll already have an instinctual knowledge of where (top, middle, bottom) you can find something in the menu. After a lot of using the same things, you'll know almost exactly where it is. You don't do O(n) over and over again.

@alyx @user @pasture they actually do search through menus when they haven't mastered the software yet.