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pop-os / cosmic-epoch

Next generation Cosmic desktop environment
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[Feature request] Searchable menus #757

Open KasMA1990 opened 3 weeks ago

KasMA1990 commented 3 weeks ago

Any given application will have some menus at the top of the window. For some, these menus will contain a lot of options, and making them searchable would be really nice. As someone who's recently-ish started using macOS, this is one of those features that are just really nice to have for all applications out of the box, also as something you can find inside the application menus.

The macOS feature is described here for example.

jacobgkau commented 3 weeks ago

Any given application will have some menus at the top of the window.

Many newer apps, especially ones from the GNOME ecosystem, do not-- they may use hamburger menus instead. Some Electron apps also don't have useful ones, since their menus may be implemented within the web engine-driven UI.

This feature request is fine, but it's going to have the same difficulties with implementation that global menus (e.g. always displaying them at the top of the screen like macOS, instead of within the application window) did. From what I recall, when Ubuntu attempted this with Unity, they had to patch some applications to expose the menus to the system. macOS has an easier time since Apple's able to set the standard of how menus are to be implemented within applications.

KasMA1990 commented 3 weeks ago

Yeah, and I'm alright with those limitations personally. It does feel best when these things are completely consistent of course, but if the logic is "when top level menu items are available on the widow, then they're searchable" I think that's okay. Even for Electron apps that follow the pattern, but with their own implementation, it'll have to do. Hopefully they look visually distinct enough from the native menus, that it gives the user a hint as to why they don't behave the same.

All in all, I'd rather have this inconsistently than not at all. If COSMIC happens to take over the world (nay, the universe! 😄) then it would suck to sit back and regret not having this very useful UI pattern 😊