Menu restructuring

[Nathan Walp]

Sean Egan wrote:
> On 5/23/07, Tim Ringenbach <tim.ringenbach at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It sounds like all of the above is for the purpose of unsetting the
>> allow_shrink property. I'm not sure why we feel the need to do this. Does it
>> hurt something? Have we gotten bug reports related to having the window too
>> small?
> 
> Yes, we have. They're always the fault of either the window manager or
> the GTK+ theme, but there are plenty of bugs caused by allowing
> arbitrarily small windows.
> 
> Mostly though, I think it's simply better UI to have enough room to
> display what you need to.
> 

There are also those that like having their buddy list absurdly small. 
If you have short enough aliases for people, and turn off idle times and 
buddy icons, you can have a reasonably-useful buddy list in less than 
the width of "Buddies Accounts", and only expand when you need to get to 
tools.  The group of people that do this is _extremely_ vocal about 
wanting this ability, and see it as a major flaw when we don't allow it. 
  A number of them use other languages that have long-ish translations 
for our menu items.

Note that I'm not one of these people, I'm perfectly happy with a 300+ 
pixel wide buddy list.


Has anyone considered or mocked-up an old-ICQ-style square Pidgin icon 
next to the status selector, that might have a menu like:

[P]
   \ Add
       \ Account
       \ Buddy
       \ Chat
       \ Group
   \ account1 at jabber.org
       \ Edit Account
       \ Yadda
       \ Yadda
   \ account2 at hotmail.com
       \ Edit Account
       \ Foo
       \ Bar
   \ Tools
       \ All the existing tools stuff
   \ List
       \ Show Offline Buddies
       \ Show Empty Groups
       \ Show Idle Times
       \ Show Buddy Details
       \ Sort By
            \ Manually
            \ Alpha
            \ Etc


I'm not gonna type out everything that needs to be here, but you get the 
idea.  I believe the jabber client Psi also has a similar menu, works 
out pretty well for them.

-Nathan