Easy to hide the menubar, tricky to get it back if the shortcut key is not known
Submitted by Alexander Schwinn @alexxcons
Assigned to Xfce Bug Triage
Description
Proposal 1:
- default "show menu" on each start of thunar
- discard the menubar by the menu-item only changes visibility for current thunar-session
- default configurable via xfconf "menubar-visible"
- remove "last-menubar-visible" from xfconf
Proposal 2:
- Show some icon on the toolbar (only if menubar is hidden ) to get the menubar back
Activity
I'd say there is something to think about here. It's true that you can't fall into this issues and getting trapped like that.
I just tried hiding the menu on mousepad, and then i could't revert (Ctrl+M doesen't work in the Gtk3 version). I had to make a search on the web (https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=9515). That's ok if you have internet but a GUI is supposed to be as intuitive as possible. That even 2 different xfce apps (thunar and mousepad) do not use the same basic, main shortcuts, i think that's awful. (I hope that is just because we are in the middle of the switch to Gtk3)
I don't like proposal 1 (it would be annoying that the app reverts you settings) nor proposal 2: it adds noise to the very clean interface (that is one of thunar's achievements). This anti-noise argument would apply also to Vktor's one, and the fact that probably you would forget what the message said.
I think we should follow good standards. Like firefox's behaviour: hiding the menu does not disable it's functionality. Firefox is one of the most popular apps and it is shipped on most linux distros as default. Nowadays almost everyone know that even if the menu is hidden you can still use it's shortcuts and that Alt+v usually manages "View"
If you have hidden the menu, that's probably because you are getting used to shortcuts, or at least experimenting with them. And even if you don't see the menu you would try with one of the shortcuts to see if it works. That's what i call intuitiveness.
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@alexxconssaid:@laurentius "hiding the menu does not disable it's functionality." This should be the default .. everything else I would call as a bug. For thunar you can use all shortcuts, no matter if the menu is hidden or not.
Consider a unexperienced user who is giving a try on thunar's options, or who just missclicks "show hidden files". Probably such a user will not know about CTRL+V or CTRL+M.
Having such users and "minimal noise" in mind I would say the most confortable solution would be the toolbar-icon + a configuration in xfconf "hidden-menu-show-toolbar-icon" for people which dont want to see the extra icon ... however this would require some work.
My second choice would be Viktor's proposal, which is nice, since it's less work to implement ;) As you said, if somebody hides the menubar on purpose, probably it is an experienced user which does not need it, and which only will hide the menubar once. So it should not hurt much to display a message-dialog this one time.
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@alexxcons "This should be the default .. everything else I would call as a bug. For thunar you can use all shortcuts, no matter if the menu is hidden or not."
You are right, shortcuts work, but not in the "menu way". I mean, when the menu is visibe, Alt+v opens the "view" menu, then, 'm' hides it. But once hidden, Alt+v > m does nothing (you must type Ctrl+m instead) In Firefox, even when the menu is hidden, pressing Alt+... gets you to the corresponding menu, which is shown until you select an action.
The "menu" shortcuts are not the same as the "application" shortcuts, and i meant the first ones. At least, i see it that way, I would make the menu temporarily visible and functional if any of its Alt+... shorctuts are pressed, just like in firefox.
I agree with you on your other considerations. And of course, there is the point of how much coding effort is needed,
Interesting exchange. Thanks for your attention.
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@alexxconssaid:In Firefox, even when the menu is hidden, pressing Alt+... gets you to the corresponding menu, which is shown until you select an action.
Ah, sorry, I misunderstood on this one. I agree, that it would make sense. Could you please open a separate bug for this feature ?
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Just upgraded to xfce 4.14 with Thunar 1.8.9. My file manager menu bar went away and I didn't know how to bring it back. I found this thread which helped me see that CTRL + M brings back the menu bar.
It would be nice if right-clicking the files area in Thunar had an item to Show/Hide the menu bar, to help users enable it again, just like in xfce4-terminal.
I even looked in Settings > File Manager Prefs and didn't see an option there to show the menu bar.
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Add the checkbox to the folder context menu. Maybe make it only visible if the menubar is hidden.
Patch 8878, "diff":
thunar.diff -
@alexxconssubmitted a patch:The attached patch shows a notification on hide (not via "notify-send" ... TODO: Port to xfce-notifyd) Probably no good idea to hard-code "Ctrl+M" .. any idea how I can get the shortcut-key string in an generic way ?
(In reply to Theo Linkspfeifer from comment 10)
Created attachment 8878 [details] diff
Add the checkbox to the folder context menu. Maybe make it only visible if the menubar is hidden.
Hmm .. I dont like that approach much. If you hide the menu-bar on purpose, you probably dont want to see extra context menu items each time you open the context menu.
In addition, if somebody hides the menu bar on accident, the context menu probably is not the location to search for recovery.
( IMO a better option could be a checkbox in the preferences which is only visible when the menu is hidden .. however I think the notification should be sufficient )
Patch 8902, "patch to show notification":
0001-Easy-to-hide-the-menubar-tricky-to-get-it-back-if-th.patch -
mate-terminal has a "Show menubar" item in the context menu (https://i.stack.imgur.com/HA00z.png), and I find it really helpful. I'm pretty sure it's in the preferences window, too.
If it's decided to put it in the preferences window, I'd suggest having it as a checkbox that's there all the time, not just if the titlebar is hidden. Reason being, users can get familiar with the options available to them as they browse the preferences dialog. Even if a user doesn't choose to hide the menubar, he might remember seeing an option for it in the preferences area and go there to recover the menubar.
Likewise, a user who doesn't know it's possible to hide the menubar would learn that it's possible, as long as the option is there all the time.
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Well that wouldn't have helped me in my case. I upgraded my system and Thunar's menubar was hidden randomly when I launched it. I couldn't figure out how to re-enable it until I found this thread. Having an option to hide/unhide the menubar in an easy-to-find place would have been really helpful.
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@alexxconssaid:(In reply to Gaelan Lloyd from comment 13)
If it's decided to put it in the preferences window, I'd suggest having it as a checkbox that's there all the time, not just if the titlebar is hidden. Reason being, users can get familiar with the options available to them as they browse the preferences dialog. Even if a user doesn't choose to hide the menubar, he might remember seeing an option for it in the preferences area and go there to recover the menubar.
IMO it only makes sense to add a checkbox into the preferences, if the preferences can be opened from within the main window without having the menubar. Without menubar you would have to know that there is "thunar-settings" which can be launched without thunar to get the menubar back.
(In reply Theo Linkspfeifer from comment 14)
A dialog window would probably be the better solution.
The notification afaik as well needs to be acknowledged ... so imo it would be not much difference. Why you think it would be better ?
(In reply to Gaelan Lloyd from comment 15)
Well that wouldn't have helped me in my case ....
If I had to guess, I would guess that you pressed CTRL+M on accidant at some point. Afaik no changes were done to the menu bar shortcut since thunar 1.6.x, and as well the default is "show"
I dont think the "hide menu bar" feature is used alot. Probably there are more users which are annoyed by a disappearing menu bar than people actually using the feature. So instead of the notification, how about the following approach:
- A checkbox "allow to hide the menu bar" in xfce4-settings-editor, default is "false"
- Only show "view-->menu-bar", if "allow to hide the menu bar" is true ... or even better: make the entry insensitive
- Only hide the menubar on CTRL+M if the "allow to hide the menu bar" is checked.
What do you think ?
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Hi Alexx, thanks for writing. I like your idea, but I think it's a lot of extra work for something really simple, and it feels like it's hiding an option that could easily be exposed under xfce4-settings-manager --> File Manager.
I can understand the pushback on adding "Show menubar" under the right-click context menu, and people wanting to keep that area clean and tidy. But I think we should give the users a place to find the setting easily, somewhere that makes sense and doesn't take a lot of hunting.
One of the reasons I love XFCE and use it as my daily driver on multiple machines is that so many settings are exposed and available. I don't have to go hunting through the settings editor to enable random checkboxes. There's this beautiful integration for File Manager in xfce4-settings-manager, so why can't we just add a single checkbox under the Display tab on "File Manager Preferences" that controls/shows if the menu bar is hidden or not?
That seems to me to be a simple, easy-to-understand, and easy-to-find option that doesn't add too much clutter and is in a place where people know to look to control the system settings.
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@andreldmsaid:I guess this discussion is lasting longer that it should...
My 2 cents: I think the dialog with a "don't bother me again" check is good enough, the notification would miss the "don't bother me again" check. I also agree that even though terminals have a "Show menu bar" check on their context menu, for Thunar it would be annoying because its context menu is (supposedly) used more often than the ones of terminals. @Alex, no more hidden options please, nobody reads the documentation upfront, users would only find those options after Google searches.
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@alexxconssaid:the notification would miss the "don't bother me again" check.
Arg, ok, a good argument pro dialog, con notification :) So far I did not consider that people may exist which toggle the menu frequently. So since brainwash anyhow prefers dialog, I guess we best go that direction.
@ Gaelan Lloyd Lets start with the dialog. If we see that there are still people having trouble with it, we can think about further options.
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@alexxconsclosed a related bug:*** Bug 9806 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
