Main menu bar has disappeared

[jhertel]

I just installed XYplorer for the first time and played around with it a bit (a few minutes), and it looks very promising!

But suddenly the main menu bar was gone:

Screenshot

Screenshot - 2014-05-11, 19_58_00 - Computer - XYplorerFree 14.00.0100 - XYplorer Free Edition.png (148.73 KiB) Viewed 3400 times

I have searched everywhere to get it back, including in the settings and the toolbar, but I could find no place to re-enable the menu bar. What did I do wrong and how do I get it back?

It seems like a bug to me, as it is so unintuitive to get it back. But of course, it could be a feature that I just need to learn how to control.

I am using WIndows 7, 64 bit.

[Marco]

Alt+Up
Maybe you just rested your hands on the keyboard...

[admin]

OK, enough, this just happens to often. I will remove Alt+Up from the factory defaults.

[Marco]

Turn it into a 3- or 4-key combo. Harder to press by mistake.

[admin]

Yeah, good idea!

[jhertel]

Thank you so much, both of you! It worked!

And now that you mention it, I do remember pressing the arrow keys around that time, apparently with the Alt key too for some strange reason.

And I too believe that one solution could be to make the shortcut a little more complicated. Maybe just Alt+Shift+Up so it is still easy to use (because it seems quite useful to turn off the menus when you know how to get them back).

But also, could there be some GUI way to get the menu bar back, so that it doesn't completely depend on a keyboard shortcut?

I just got another idea: Pressing F10 is a standard way of activating the menus in Windows. I tried that when the menu was gone, but it didn't work. Unfortunately, I can see that this shortcut seems to be assigned to another function in XYplorer.

But pressing the left Alt key alone is another standard way of activating the menu bar. Maybe XYplorer could automatically show the menu bar if it is hidden and Alt is pressed and released? Either show it temporarily (hiding it again when it loses focus) or "permanently" (like pressing Alt+Up). That would be intuitive for people like me that know that pressing Alt activates the menu. And then there could be a menu item in the View menu to turn on the main menu bar "permanently" again: View | Menu bar (with a toggle check mark like the Auto-Refresh item), even showing its shortcut (which is now Alt+Up). To me, that would be intuitive. If that was implemented when I used the program the first time, I would have found out about the menu bar show/hide thing myself and I would even have discovered the shortcut because it was mentioned in the menu.

[admin]

That would work, but Marcos idea is much easier to do (for me) and works just as well.

[jhertel]

I disagree that it will work just as well (it's a usability thing and I described how that works for a newcomer), but I do agree that Marco's idea is much simpler to implement. There is no doubt that usability takes time to implement.

With Marco's idea the chance is smaller that a newcomer makes the menu disappear by chance. But when it happens, as Murphy's Law states it will, the situation is exactly the same as I found myself in: It is impossible to get the menu back without inside information about the keyboard shortcut. There is simply no intuitive way to get it back.

[binocular222]

Then, don't assign any default keyboard shortcut at all.

[bdeshi]

Changing the default shortcut is easier to do, but I have to agree with jhertel, popping up / focusing the menubar with alt keypress is better from the users perspective.
Like how firefox does it, when its main menu is hidden.

[admin]

I added an experimental tweak:

Code: Select all

    + Tweak to toggle the main menu by ALT:
        HideMainMenuToggleByAlt=1

[bdeshi]

It's experimental, but the tweak should be effective only when menubar is hidden; and should just focus the menu when it's already enabled, instead of hiding it.

[Nighted]

Don't fix what ain't broken.

[admin]

It's experimental, but the tweak should be effective only when menubar is hidden; and should just focus the menu when it's already enabled, instead of hiding it.

Well, I followed the Firefox example since it's been mentioned here.

[LittleBiG]

It's experimental, but the tweak should be effective only when menubar is hidden; and should just focus the menu when it's already enabled, instead of hiding it.

Well, I followed the Firefox example since it's been mentioned here.

With all my respect, you didn't. Firefox doesn't hide the toolbar by pressing Alt.

Additionally, I would suggest to hard code it instead of the tweak. If a user knows about the existing of this kind of tweak, he will have already known by then how to restore it by a keyboard shortcut. This ALT should be for the cluless, tweakless users who want to try something familiar to show the accidentally hidden menu bar.

However, personally I would choose the easy way: just simply delete the keyboard shortcut. If somebody wants to use it, go and find the shortcut and give an appropriate one.