Glenn Posts: 99 11/08/2015

Glenn Posts: 99 I suggested in another thread the idea of having a different result for right and left click actions, and the feedback was that this adds complexity. While it does, indeed, add complexity, such complexity is found in nearly every existing Windows program, so that particular complexity is somewhat commonplace, and knowledge of it fairly widespread. It is certainly true that any feature added to a program adds complexity. Complexity adds power to a program, but concurrently makes the full set of program capabilities larger and thus harder to master in full. Users tend to learn only what they need to learn to get their activities done... in fact, many users limit their effectiveness in using programs because of their unwillingness to learn more features, even features that would assist them in their activities. Most programs that I have used that have different results for left and right click typically put "easy" or "commonly used" functions on the left-click menu, and more complex or less commonly used functions on the right click menu. Windows Explorer even goes as far as to have yet more entries show up on the right click menu only if the user also presses a shiftt key. Personally, I find "copy as path" and "start CMD prompt here" to be more frequently used in my right click emnu from Windows Explorer than many of the other entries in that menu.. but i have to remember to hold Shift to get them to show up. Back to my original suggestion for splitting the SyMenu menu into separate left and right click menus. I would perceive three kinds of users for SyMenu. 1. Those that make menus for their own use. 2. Those that make menus for use by others. 3. Those that use menus made by others. The first group is likely to regularly edit their menus, although I suspect that they use the entries more often than they edit them. The second group is probably the smallest group, and they may well tweak menus as much or more than they use them. The third group wouldn't edit the menus at all. You have already recognized, in having both the full menu and compact menu available, that the SyMenu-defined items are "in the way" of efficient use of the user-defined menu entries, once the menu creation process is complete. Putting the SyMenu-defined items in a submenu gets them "out of the way" of efficient use of the user-definned menu. However, it also make use of the SyMenu-defined items less efficient when editing a menu. One can switch the configuration back and forth between Compact and Full menu mode but doing that repeatedly is not particularly efficient either. My suggestion goes just one step further. A willingness by a user to deal with the complexity of having different menus on left and right buttons, which is an extremely common form of complexity among Windows programs, can restore the efficiency of using the SyMenu-defined items for menu editing while not reducing the efficiency of using/testing the user-defined menu. But after thinking through all of the above, it occurred to me that for most menu editing operations, the function really used most is Tools / Configuration, and a hot-key directly to that screen would _add_ efficiency to the editing process, without splitting the menus or switch back and forth between Normal and Compact view.

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