RE: [External] : Re: Experimentally unbind M-o on the trunk

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> That only works well if you can guess, up front, which top-level menu
> item has the command you are looking for.  Which is not easy, except
> for a few trivial operations, especially with very large and
> feature-rich programs like Emacs.  Traversing the entire menu
> structure looking for what you want is not my idea of good time, even
> though I have much more patience doing that than most newbies
> nowadays.

If you have completion against full menu paths,
as I mentioned with the example of La Carte,
and if you can match arbitrary parts of any
completion candidate, as I mentioned with the
example of Icicles, then it's not at all a
chore to get to _any_ part of the _complete_
menu-bar forest.

E.g., I see this if I type just `save' to the
prompt from `lacarte-execute-menu-command':

Buffers > Frames > SAVE                                                                           
Buffers > SAVE  %                                                                                 
Do Re Mi > Save Frame Configuration          (C-x t .)                                                     
File > Bookmarks > Here (This File/Buffer) >
  Save Bookmarks Here To Bookmark File...    (C-x x C-s)            
File > Bookmarks > Save Bookmarks As...      (C-x x w)                                                 
File > Bookmarks > Save Bookmarks            (C-x x s)                                                       
File > Open Recent > Save list now                                                                
File > Save As...                            (C-x C-w)                                                                       
Icicles > + Remove Saved Candidate Set...                                                         
Icicles > Add/Update Saved Candidate Set...                                                       
Icicles > Save String to Variable...                                                              
Options > Customize Emacs > Saved Options                                                         
Options > Icicles > Toggle > Highlighting Saved Candidates                                        
Options > Save Frame Configs (DoReMi)                                                             
Options > Save Options                                                                            
Options > Save Place in Files between Sessions                                                    
Tools > Spell Checking > Save Dictionary

(That's with substring completion.  And some of
those menus are from my code.)

That's a pretty darn quick way to search the entire
menu-bar forest, to see all menu items whose paths
contain the word "save".

And I can quickly narrow further, of course.

> Of course, putting more command on our menus cannot possibly hurt,
> quite the contrary, so I'm not arguing against that.  I just very much
> doubt we will be able to put there any significant fraction of the
> hundreds of important commands we have to really make a difference.

Not sure what kind of difference is being called for.
But you can add any number of menus and menu items,
without creating a user-access problem.  Users can
handle just as many commands with menus as they can
with just `M-x' or keyboard keys.  Provided they have
useful completion tools, that is.

> To say nothing of the fact that there's a fashion out there to
> turn off the menu bar very early in the user's learning curve.

That fashion might be related to current weak menu
support by Emacs - perhaps especially for 3rd-party
packages.

But sure, many developer users of Emacs (thus many
Emacs users) might not be accustomed to using menus
heavily.  They can learn, if menu support is improved,
especially access using completion.

> Typing '?' or C-h in the middle of any key sequence
> should (and usually does) provide discovery.

Yup.  very good.  Likewise, things like key completion
(Icicles), `keysee.el', and `which-key.el'.
___

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