"Application" button like in web-browsers

[Marco]

Yes, I know XY is not a web-browser (well, it's a file-system browser and manager...).
However I was wondering if there are any plans to add a toolbar button that contains all the menu bar items, roughly like in the pic (there should be an arrow at the right of each line, like in standard menus). I would have done it myself if it was possible via scripting.
I think such addition is very "contemporary" and helps saving a few vertical pixels (and those using widescreens know that even a few vertical pixels make a huge difference).

[admin]

Cool idea, but very difficult if e.g. "File" shall have its contents as fly-out right in the parent menu ("File >").

[Nighted]

Is this not currently possible using custom buttons and scripting? I have toggled the menu off and added menus for those items I might need to access.

[Marco]

That's a pity
I would have asked why it is so difficult, but since you don't enjoy talking about code anymore I keep my mouth shut. But I still hope to see it someday

PS: right click on a Catalog item pops a menu with two items (Insert as new category here and Insert as new item(s) here) which have fly-outs...

Is this not currently possible using custom buttons and scripting? I have toggled the menu off and added menus for those items I might need to access.

Can you create something like the menu in Opera or Firefox similar to the screenshot above?

[admin]

The main menu items (File, Edit etc) are not children of any top menu, but they are top menus each.

[admin]

Can you create something like the menu in Opera or Firefox similar to the screenshot above?

Where in Firefox is that button? I don't seem to have it.

[Marco]

Top left of Firefox window. It's orange.

PS: I understand. And maybe that's the reason why with # commands we can only open submenus of File, Edit etc?

[admin]

Not here (firefox ESR 17.0.7).

PS: Yes, kind of the reason.

[Marco]

[admin]

No such button here. Anyway, it's not possible for XY so don't bother.

[Nighted]

It is my understanding that so long as a menu command has a corresponding ID, then you can create a custom button and populate the menu with any functions that you wish. I don't think you can create sub menus on the button though, only separators.

So this is possible for the end user to create already unless I am missing something here.

[PeterH]

No such button here.

If I understand it right it's shown if the menus are hidden.
(Right-click in menus, de-select "Menüleiste")

[admin]

No such button here.

If I understand it right it's shown if the menus are hidden.
(Right-click in menus, de-select "Menüleiste")

Aha! Yo, now I got it! But, at least with Firefox, it does not feature the main menu (File, Edit, etc), but a collection of important commands. So they also did not manage to do it.

[Regmos]

...So they also did not manage to do it.

A couple of extensions that does the trick.

Compact Menu

Personal Menu

[TheQwerty]

Scripting it so that it stays current by dynamically generating the menu is very difficult, and even so you'll still be missing some things:

1. You cannot retrieve the checked state for all of the stateful items.
2. You cannot retrieve the enabled state, so you have to determine and build in that smartness on your own if desired.
3. To retrieve the command IDs requires the user copying the contents of the List All Commands dialog, probably each time an XY version change is detected.
4. Scripting lacks true sub-menus which means you have to either get creative or rude in how you handle a user wanting to return to a parent menu.
5. To offer the access keys you need to retrieve the true captions. This means becoming proficient in parsing the language files, and since they likely won't exist for an English user you'll need another way to retrieve the English captions. The only reliable way I know is to extract them from XYplorer.exe which is messy and/or creates a dependency on strings.exe.

A long time ago I had a proof of concept script that accomplished all but the first two of those. It required strings.exe and a python script and was before XY was translated so it only supported English. Today it's broken because using strings.exe to extract captions from XYplorer.exe is messy, stupid, and the addition of a file menu to the Interface Translation Tool has broken my python script.

Now that XY is translated it would be ideal to use the user's desired language for the menu captions, but that doesn't seem easy, and creates a big question of what to do when the user wants English and there is no local lng file to reference.


Hitting this roadblock in how to retrieve the menu captions has kind of killed my desire to finish rewriting this script. Any suggestions?