arm@sps.com (Annette Myjak) (08/01/90)
I have a pulldown menu which contains 34 items (read 'pushbuttons'). Needless to say, I can't see all of them at one time (the menu continues far below the edge of my terminal screen!) Has anyone developed a scrollable menu or have suggestions on how to accomplish such a thing? If not, any suggestions on how to see all the menu items at one time? I'm using UIL and Motif 1.0. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Annette Myjak arm@sps.com
bd@hpopd.HP.COM (Bob Desinger) (08/29/90)
Annette Myjak (arm@sps.com) asks: > I have a pulldown menu which contains 34 items (read 'pushbuttons'). > Needless to say, I can't see all of them at one time (the menu continues > far below the edge of my terminal screen!) > Has anyone developed a scrollable menu or have suggestions on how to > accomplish such a thing? > If not, any suggestions on how to see all the menu items at one time? Thirty-four seems like overloading the menu mechanism. The general rule of thumb I've seen is to limit items in a menu pane to about 7 plus or minus 2 (or thereabouts). Much larger numbers might overwhelm the people who run the program, especially those new to window systems. Can you break the menus up into other menus? For instance, if your menu provides a set of actions that people can use to handle mail, can you break this into menus labeled "Folders", "Reading", and "Writing"? If you can't break things up, how about cascading menus? If the 34 things are all instances of the same thing---for example, if they're all mail folders---it seems like a scrolled list would be better. A person would select some (single) menu item, and the list would pop up. The person selects a line in the list and pops this dialog box down. Additionally, a double-click in the list would select a line and pop the dialog box down. -- bd bob desinger bd@sde.HP.COM uunet!hplabs!hp-ses!bd