Schneegans
commented
1 week ago Hi there! Thank you very much for the kind words! There had been a similar request (#462) before, so I think you have a point here. An "Anchored Mode" could be possible to implement, although we would need to drop all marking-mode functionality when it's enabled. I am pretty sure that selections in such an anchored mode would be less efficient!
- The "disorienting shifting" has a very important purpose: Everytime a menu or submenu is opened, it opens exactly at your mouse pointer. As a consequence, the next selection can be made by moving your mouse in a straight line of which the length does not matter. If the menu opened not at you mouse pointer (as it would be the case in the "anchored mode"), you would need to move your pointer a certain distance so that it ends up in the correct wedge. This requires a feedback-loop in your brain which will make this much slower. You will have to watch your mouse pointer.
- This "shifting behaviour" also makes selections in Kando scale invariant. It never matters how far you move your mouse! Only the direction matters! This makes it easily possible to select things without looking at the menu.
- Last but not least, Kando is not a simple pie menu (as Blender's menus are); Kando is a marking menu (which were described first about 30 years ago by Gordon Kurtenbach). As such it allows you to select items by drawing zig-zag lines. This is extremely powerful! You can select things in subsubsubmenus in well below a second without looking at your screen. I expect an anchored mode to be several times slower.
But it shouldn't be too hard to implement, so I can add it anyways. Yet I would encourage everyone to try to understand the unconventional behavior of a marking menu. Once embraced (and you may need to wrap your head around it as it is somewhat different to "usual" pie menu), you may see that there are significant advantages in the current design.
in4matix
offset-torque
Description
Firstly thank you very much for this application. I was a long time user of Easystroke and Gnome Pie. I love pie menus and I think that computers need pie menus. Also Kando's design is very tasteful and your tutorial/update videos are very nice too. Overall Kando is an exemplary open source project. :100:
My problem: Currently Kando moves when the cursor navigates sub-menus and I find this shifting behavior very disorienting. Kando is not anchored to the screen space. Especially when I go back to main level from a sub-menu, it feels like the menus are connected with a rubber band and the whole menu is sliding all over the place. This movements require re-registering the menu/sub-menu location every time it moves. As an example, I am using pie menus in Blender and they never move once they are open.
I guess the reasoning behind this is keeping the menus always in the screen space (for small/mobile screens?). But my preference is for a centered menu that is stable so I can use the (both absolute and relative) screen location memory (in addition to muscle memory). Please note that I am not saying this is the correct way. I am just saying that there are perceptual differences between people and I suspect that considerable amount of users might prefer this type of stable behavior.
So if you haven't thought about this, please consider adding an "anchored mode" that will fix the menu to the opening location (whether it is at the cursor location or at the screen center) and never move it when traversing the sub-menus. Without this option, sub-menus would be unusable for me (and I guess for many others) and unfortunately I can only use Kando as a single level Gnome Pie replacement.
Affected Desktop Environments
All
Additional Information
No response