Menu commands to M-x history?

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

Menu commands are all commands that can be started from M-x.  I think
they should be added to M-x history.

Users often uses menus to start commands because they do not know the
command name. Menus are very good for them -- and for commands that we
seldom use. (Advanced users may prefer a controller/view UI instead,
like Drew has been trying to make with Icicles.)

We have had a hard time to decide how the menus should look. There are
now many very useful commands, especially for beginners, like
rgrep/lgrep etc that we have not been able to place in the menus
because we do not know where to put them. That is not very good for
anyone of course, but worse for newcommers.

One reason is the available space in the menus. They should not be too
long and there should not be too many levels. These two constraints
fight each other.

I personally prefer each menu level to be not too long and good
structured by dividing it into groups. In my opinion it makes it
easier to quickly read them and search for commands.

However making it menu level smaller makes the menu levels deeper
instead. Some people have said that this makes it very inconvenient
for things you use often. Adding the commands choosen from the menus
to M-x history may make it less inconvenient.


Now, if someone says it clutters the M-x history then I must ask if it
is not cluttered already. What are those things that are there already
when you start with "emacs -Q"? ;-)


BTW I have lately seen some new kind of problems with the menus. I
guess I am one of those that are most likely to see it, since my
patches on w32 allows normal access to the menus. Lately I have seen
things like

    <emacs-manual> is not defined.

That looks bad to me. Anyone knows what is going on?