Move TimeSavers menu off the Main Menu

[justcla]

Please move the TimeSavers menu item off the Main Menu as it clutters the top level space and re-uses the letter T for a keyboard accelerator, blocking me from going to the Tools menu.

My suggestion would be to move TimeSavers into the Tools menu.

[yannduran]

There's quite a number of precedents to have a company-specific or extension-specific menu on the menu bar, for easy access. [Resharper] is a good example. [Supercharger] is another that I have installed. [Favorites' is yet another one that I have installed that does this.

It was originally going to be a Luminous menu, so that all Luminous Software extensions could add to the one menu. But with Time Savers, the whole idea was saving time, and people not having to hunt through menus to find what they needed. For that reason, moving it into the Tools menu would basically defeat the purpose.

I'm not sure if I can actually add an option to display it or not, I'd have to check. But I just wanted to check with you first whether this was super important for you. I haven't had anyone else ever mention it being a problem. As I said, people tend to be used to it.

Let me know if you still think you absolutely need it removed and I'll see what I can do.

[justcla]

Agreed. Some extensions do put menu items on the main bar. But typically these are pretty large/important extensions. ReSharper is a good example. But as a general rule, we don't encourage every extension developer to add an item to the main menu. Only in cases where it is super critical/worthy of the main menu is it recommended. I take the point that you want easy access to the commands in the menu, and putting them in a sub menu adds one extra step when activating the commands via mouse or keyboard accelerators. (Alt+[letter]). Allowing the commands to be assigned in the keyboard options is a great way to deliver fast keyboard accessibility. Have you given all the commands good command names that can be found in Tools->Options->Keyboard?

[justcla]

I see that other extensions do it quite frequently. I feel this extension is just as worthy of a main menu item as any other.

So long as it doesn't hold a keyboard accelerator, then it should not affect user behavior other than adding width to the bar. Might as well leave it there.

[yannduran]

Also, I just checked, and Alt-T still brings up the Tools menu. The Time Savers menu currently has no accelerator key defined. You can check this for yourself, by pressing the Alt key by itself and you'll see each of the menus' accelerator keys underlined.

I might actually add an Alt-I accelerator key now that I realise that it would give people who prefer to use the keyboard over a mouse a quicker way to open the menu. That key combination is currently not being used.

[justcla]

Then again, without a keyboard accelerator on it, how are you meant to access it quickly?

[justcla]

Chad Boles would be very upset if you took Alt+i. It's in Team Explorer for "Commit".

[justcla]

But I've submitted a pull request for Ctrl+Enter = Commit in Team Explorer, which should free up the Alt+i shortcut.

Edit: The pull request is still under consideration.

[yannduran]

That's a good point about Alt-I being used for commit. I wasn't aware of that one. I can hold off adding one. Adding a keyboard accelerator for Time Savers isn't a necessity anyway.

[justcla]

It would make it easier to access, which is kind of the point of TimeSavers. ;-)