Re: C-h K and C-h F in the Help menu

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman.073@student.lu.se>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Sat, 20 May 2006 23:19:02 +0200
>> From: Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman.073@student.lu.se>
>> CC:  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>
>> I recently got some comments about the help menu in CVS Emacs from a 
>> long term Emacs user and fan (+15 y usage). One of the comments were 
>> that there are too many things in the help menu.
>>     
>
> For some value of ``too many'': we have 17 entries there.  Why is this
> bad?  Each entry can be useful in specific situations.
>   
It is a good question. As I understand it the complaints was from a user 
interface view. Such a view is a mixture of logical and psychological 
matters. Neither a logical or a psychological argument is then entirely 
useful on its own even if they on their own are completely valid.

At first sight one might think that the time to find something in a menu 
is proportional to the length of the menu. I think however that the time 
required rises much faster, but I have not read any research about this. 
As I said before one of the factors is probably the short term memory 
span. This means that clear grouping with horizontal lines will probably 
help (as soon as the user understands the grouping). In the process of 
trying to grasp the grouping it seems to me that there should be a big 
advantage in fewer items.

Submenus will reduce the number of items even if there is only two 
subitems and I believe that this will be helpful for the reasons I have 
tried to outline above.