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Fully Customizable menues Issue Tools
issueid=427 07-01-2009 11:35 PM
Human being with feelings
Fully Customizable menues

I wish reaper had an ability to customize all menues that it has - main menue, all context menues. That will greatly improve usability cause it will be possible to throw out unnecessary stuff from there.

e.g current status with colouring items

- set item colour to custom colour
- set item colours to random colour
- set item colours to one random colour
- bla bla bla

it's overloaded. for me it will be more convenient to leave just the most frequently usable commands and put the rest into the main menu or bind to keyboard shortcut
Issue Details
Issue Type Closed Issue
Project Deprecated REAPER issue tracker
Category GUI and graphics
Status Duplicate
Priority 7
Affected Version 3.05
Closed Version (none)
Yes votes 40
No votes 5
Assigned Users (none)
Tags (none)

07-02-2009 04:14 AM
Human being with feelings
 
I don't think FULLY customizable menus is a good idea. Too much 'freedom' comes with a cost. At the very least it will allow for people running very differently customized Reapers creating a gap.

- How do I do X and Y?
- Oh it's simple, right-click and select Z from the menu
- I can't find Z
- Oh you're right, you need to add it manually.

(any similarities with actual X, Y and Zs are purely coincidental)

I vote for:

1) Better arrangement/rethinking of the menus from the devs to make them smaller and more functional.

2) Allow for partially customizable menus. Some core functionality should not be changeable.
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07-02-2009 04:48 AM
Human being with feelings
 
Good points.

With functions to "Save customized menu sets", "Load customized menu set" and "Revert to factory menu set" then we can switch back to the factory menus to respond to any queries (but I, for one, will generally, forget to do that before responding :))

Same goes, currently, for shortcuts to Actions.
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07-02-2009 08:02 AM
Human being with feelings
 
I'm with Evan and would prefer to see the devs improve the menus.
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07-02-2009 08:13 AM
Human being with feelings
 
improved menus and customizable menus gets my vote.
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07-02-2009 10:06 AM
sir sir is offline
Human being with feelings
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Evan
I don't think FULLY customizable menus is a good idea.
...

I vote for:

1) Better arrangement/rethinking of the menus from the devs to make them smaller and more functional.

2) Allow for partially customizable menus. Some core functionality should not be changeable.
+1

Adobe recently started doing the customizable menus thing (they actually change depending on what workspace you're using) and I can never find what I need. More specific/better arranged menus would be brilliant.
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07-02-2009 11:40 AM
Human being with feelings
 
2 evan:
partially you are right - for newbies it's not a very good idea, but I think that among reaper users there are a lot of "switchers" like me and we want some cool stuff in reaper wich will help to work faster.
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07-02-2009 12:02 PM
Human being with feelings
 
Some of us have already been discussing this quite a bit.

A new-user-friendly bunch of menus and a standard bunch of menus is a good thing as long they're easy to switch. A newbie menu structure needs lots of testing.
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07-02-2009 05:04 PM
NAS NAS is offline
Human being with feelings
 
Oh shit how long have i wanted this

NAS
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07-02-2009 06:15 PM
Human being with feelings
 
Corel Draw has had this for many years, fully customizable menus, and it's great. You can arrange menu functions any way you like and hide things you don't want there. You can even create custom menus and move things under them.

It can always be reset to default if need be but the point is to have it your way.

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08-21-2009 05:42 AM
Administrator
 
Duplicate of http://forum.cockos.com/project.php?issueid=718 (which is already elevated, so no information lost by discarding the votes for this FR).
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08-30-2009 01:13 PM
Human being with feelings
 
I have one more idea. May be it's separate FR, but IMHO it could be considered as a good compromise:

1) Now it's clear that menu items should separated into 2 (or more) categories: core items and optional.

2) Let REAPER to track optional menu items usage and after some time then hide not or rarely used ones. Hidden items should be grouped and somewhat visible indicator of "Hidden items group" should be present. That could be clicked and hidden items will show up in a menu temporarily. If you will click some hidden item often enough - it should be unhidden to others "frequently used" items.
Like in Microsoft Office 2003, hey, those who used it should get the idea.

You could complain that such menu items usage tracking could be resource and performance hog. Yes, to avoid drawback some new options could be introduced: let's say "Menu item usage tracking" - On/Off.

Initially you set that to "On" and start to "train" Reaper about your preferrable menu items (just by doing usual work, great? ;).
When you're satisfied with menu layout you just set menu tracking to "Off" and viola - you have customized menus without any additional configuring, performance penalty and ability to always quickly use rarely items.

What do you think about?
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08-30-2009 01:34 PM
Human being with feelings
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by irium

What do you think about?
Horrible, just horrible. An application should never ever try to figure out automatically for the user the visibility of GUI elements. If there's gonna be the ability to customize the menus that should be 100% under the user's control.
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08-31-2009 10:35 AM
Human being with feelings
 
Irium, that idea has been discussed quite a bit as well. There seems to be a mostly negative response to this, as the AI behind the menu tracking usually performs to few peoples satisfaction. Thus the idea was abandoned.

Maybe the developers surprise us.

I for one favour control over automatic behaviour in this area. To me, it's more a question of getting the interface to edit the menus right.

If there's a function in there to suggest a menu with the most used functions for example, which I can then edit, that might be helpful.
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08-31-2009 10:48 AM
Human being with feelings
 
fwiw I use the menus in part as a quick reminder of what commands are available - in general I invoke actions from the keyboard. So I want to see those actions which I *don't* use frequently in the menus - actions I use frequently are those which I have assigned to keys and memorized...
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