Menu restructuring

[Christopher Stafford]

Nathan Walp wrote:
> 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:
>
>             \ 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.
>   
Much as I hate the help menu, I agree that it needs to  be there with
about and online help in it. The debug window should be in tools. In
addition, getting rid of it doesn't solve the problem. I can get a
perfectly usable buddy list in a width that can't contain the words
Buddies, Accounts and Tools, and certainly if any of them were longer in
translation it would be way out.

Is it possible for the app to detect a lack of horizontal space and for
the existing horizontal menu to automatically turn into a vertical menu
(something like Nathan suggests, but with exactly the same structure as
the normal menu), i.e. a single horizontal menu item submenus of
Buddies, Accounts, Tools and Help?