149625 - Menu item labels unattractively overlap into keyboard shortcut area

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: UI Widgets, defect)

Description

[Jason Bassford]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.0+)
Gecko/20020605
BuildID:    2002060508

When tabs are being used, the formatting of the text that appears under the
Bookmarks menu is too cluttered, making it difficult to read the menu items. 
The "culprit" is the text "Bookmark this group of tabs..." and the fact that the
keyboard shortcuts immediately above and below are not far enough to the right.
 (When no tabs are used, that menu item is greyed out so this problem disappears.)

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Mozilla without any tabs.  Click on Bookmarks.
2. Open one or more tabs.  Now click on Bookmarks.
3. Observe the difference in readability and how badly cluttered the Bookmarks
menu appears when tabs are in use.

Actual Results:  The Bookmarks menu text is difficult to read.

Expected Results:  Menu items and keyboard shortcuts should be clearly
delineated in discrete "columns" that do not overlap.

Comment 1

[Jason Bassford]

-> Bookmarks

I'm not sure if this is the correct component, but User Interface Design
produced no action of any kind on this bug in a month and a half.

Comment 2

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

A month and a half? Luxury! Why, back in my day, bug reports would go for 
seasons or years without being worked on ...

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 156121 ***

Comment 3

[Jason Bassford]

Reopening.  This bug isn't a duplicate of either bug 156121 or bug 149625 -
although fixing either one would (indirectly) solve the problem reported here. 
But not to worry.  As soon as one of those is fixed I'll mark this one as
INVALID because there will no longer be a "Bookmark this group of tabs..." entry
causing formatting problems.  (Assuming that one of those does get fixed.  If
not, we should deal with the formatting problem here.)

(Why, I hear tell of the days when there were no computers to have bugs...)

Comment 4

[Jason Bassford]

Oops - I meant bug 158543 above.

Comment 5

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

No comment in 5½ years

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9pre) Gecko/2008040301 SeaMonkey/2.0a1pre

I don't see the problem. Does anyone still see it? If not, resolve WORKSFORME.

Comment 6

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

No reply to comment #5. Last call, ladies & gentlemen!

Comment 7

[Jason Bassford]

The problem has not changed.  I re-read my original description and still agree with it.

We should not be seeing:

Ctrl+Shift+D
Ctrl+D
of tabs...
Ctrl+B

All three keyboard shortcuts should be moved by about 11 characters so that there is a clear delineation (whitespace / column) between the menu item text and the shortcuts.

Comment 8

[Jason Bassford]

Alternatively, if the keyboard shortcuts cannot be moved to the right, show the menu item in question on two lines, with the second line slightly indented so that it's part of the same item but in its own separate column:

Bookmark this group
 of tabs...

Comment 9

[Jason Bassford]

I should additionally note that there is now some similar "clutter" in the View menu (Character Encoding overlaps with the column of keyboard shortcuts), and the Help menu (For Internet Explorer Users).

Both the Go and Window menus have they keyboard shortcuts moves far more to the right than any of the other menus.  In my mind, they do it right.  All of the other menus should have the shortcuts moved that far to the right, thereby preventing this issue.  I don't know why things are inconsistent.

Comment 10

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

One reason I'm not seeing this is that I have some bookmarks with rather long titles, which make the Bookmarks menu wider. This suggests a workaround: find a page with a long title, such as this Bugzilla page, and add it to your Bookmarks (not in a subfolder but at the top level, though possibly at the end of the list after a separator). This will widen your Bookmarks menu to accomodate the long title.

I'm not saying this is a _fix_, it is just a _workaround_ to let you live with the bug until it is fixed (if ever it is).

Comment 11

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

Oh, and BTW -- Jason, which version of SeaMonkey are you using at present?

Comment 12

[Jason Bassford]

Attachment: Problem with the alignment of the keyboard shortcut entries.

Comment 13

[Jason Bassford]

"One reason I'm not seeing this is that I have some bookmarks with rather long titles, which make the Bookmarks menu wider."

Interesting.  I use bookmark folders with the actual bookmarks inside.  The folders have relatively short names.  I tried putting an actual bookmark at the top level - and you're right.  The right-hand (shortcut key) column moved to the right.  Which doesn't make any sense to me.  Because the ">" symbols that expand bookmark folders are NOT aligned with the keyboard shortcut entries in the first place - so they don't belong to the same "menu column".  Also, they don't seem to have a relative distance from the bookmark folder names.  (I renamed one of my folders to have a very long name, and it made no difference to the location of the ">" expander - although it did still push out the keyboard shortcut column.)  I don't know why the length of bookmark names and bookmark folder names should be affecting the location of the keyboard shortcuts in the menu.

Also - this still doesn't address the same problem with the View and Help menus.

I'm using an April 27th trunk build.

I'm also going to attach a screenshot not only of what I see with the Bookmarks menu, but also with the View and Help menus - just so that we're all on the same page. :)

Also - as this is also affecting other menus, rather than just the Bookmarks menu - perhaps this is in the wrong component.  Should it really be moved to XP Apps: GUI Features or even just XP Apps?  I'm hesitant to move it to one of those - but there doesn't seem to be anything that covers the layout of menus in general...

Comment 14

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Firefox and Thunderbird have this problem too. For example, in Thunderbird's "File" menu, "Open Saved Message…" creeps into the span containing the "Ctrl+W" of "Close". And in Firefox, install the Abduction extension, then in the "File" menu see how "Save Page As Image…" creeps unattractively under the "Ctrl+S" of "Save Page As…". Therefore, this is a toolkit bug.

But if all a menu's keyboard shortcuts were in a completely separate column from all the menu's item labels, menus would get unreasonably wide. For example, consider how much wider Thunderbird's "Tools" menu would become if the "Ctrl+2" of "Address Book" had to start after "Delete Mail Marked as Junk in Folder" had finished. Linux users can see a real-life example in Evolution: keeping all a menu's keyboard shortcuts clear of all the menu's item labels results in the "File" and "Search" menus being so wide, it's almost difficult to tell which item a keyboard shortcut applies to. Would narrowing these menus cause unattractive overlap? No, because the relevant items are in different sections of the menu -- there is at least one separator between them.

So, I suggest adjusting the menu layout code such that menu item X's label can extend into the keyboard shortcut area of menu item Y, *only if* there are one or more separators between X and Y. This means in the examples shown in attachment 318309 [details], the "Bookmarks" and "Help" menus would get wider, but the "View" menu would not.

Comment 15

[Jason Bassford]

"So, I suggest adjusting the menu layout code such that menu item X's label can extend into the keyboard shortcut area of menu item Y, *only if* there are one
or more separators between X and Y."

...and, otherwise, have a variable width for the menu items - with a set amount of whitespace at the right - rather than a fixed width?

This makes sense to me.  Note, too, that we currently have the reverse situation.  Look at the Window menu.  Right now, there's far too MUCH whitespace between the menu items and the shortcuts - all because of the existence of long URLs listed below the divider.  In your scheme, this should be fixed too.  Almost all of the whitespace should disappear above the divider, but the overall width should remain the same to accomodate the URL text below the divider.  I will attach a screenshot of this problem also.

Comment 16

[Jason Bassford]

Attachment: The Windows menu with too much whitespace.

Comment 17

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

No, all keyboard shortcuts in a menu should still be lined up with each other, otherwise they become very visually distracting (e.g. when scanning through menus looking for a particular item). So there's not much you could do about the "Window" menu -- though if you implemented the algorithm I described in <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99604#c7>, you could get away with making the "Window" menu narrower without making window titles more ambiguous.

Comment 18

[Jason Bassford]

"No, all keyboard shortcuts in a menu should still be lined up with each other"

Er, I totally agree.  I'm not sure where the disconnect is.  For the Windows menus, simply remove the block of whitespace that I enclosed in the attached screenshot for the Windows menu - but leave the width of the windows itself the same.  All keyboard shortcuts would be aligned with each other - just without the huge amount of whitespace between them and the different browser functions.  The part of the window below the divider would say just as it is - since it has not keyboard shortcuts.  (You'd end up with a lot of whitespace to the right of the keyboard shortcuts, but I don't see a problem with that.)

Comment 19

[Jason Bassford]

Attachment: Redesigned Windows menu.

Comment 20

[Jason Bassford]

Attachment: Redesigned other menus.

Comment 21

[Jason Bassford]

Attached (edited) screenshots of how I think the Windows menu should look, as well as how the Bookmarks and Help menus should change.  (As you said, the View menu can remain as it is because everything is contained between separators.)