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Currently in KDE, (and almost every other desktop environment out there) submenus can be a pain to use.

[srikethrough]EDIT: A clarification, this idea is about service menus. Service menus are the ones you get when you right click on something, or the menus you get from the menu bar.[/stikethrough]

EDIT AGAIN: The menu's I'm actually talking about are the normal menus. The context menus, and the menu bar menus. Sorry for the confusion

When you hover over a item in a menu to activate your sub menu of choice, it requires strait moment of the mouse to get to the sub menu, otherwise you might accidentally hover over another item, and your sub menu of choice will disappear, causing you to try again.

If your sub menu has a sub menu of its own that you need, it tends to appear over the first sub menu. One wrong movement of the mouse causes both sub menus to disappear causing you to have to do it again.

Sub menus offer a organized view of commands to a program, so I don't think they should be dropped.

My suggestion it that when you hover over the menu segment for the sub menu, the sub menu appears, but when you give it an extra click, it 'locks' it in place, so you can move the cursor anywhere you want, and the sub menu will stay up. another click anywhere off the submenu will cause it to disappear.

Some method of letting the user know that its clickable should also be added so the user knows the feature is there. Perhaps the menu element for the sub menu should be circled the same way buttons are, when hovered and when clicked should look like a pushed in button, and when the sub menu is deactivated it should resume its former appearance

Keeping the standard hover ability won't force people to change their ways, and adding the click gives additional usability.

what do you think?


(a technical note: the sub menus parent menu with the sub menu open might have to be locked from any input, it there is a technical issue (with QT or whatever) with being able to interact with the parent menu with the sub menu open, I don't know if its required)

Have you tried Lancelot yet?
Or even Kickoff it has the "locking in place ability" but only shows one submenu at once...
Edit:
Lancelot has pretty much everything you wish.

I was talking more about the ones when your right click on a folder view plasmoid, or drop down menus form konqueror.

sorry for the confusion.

nerdopolis wrote:I was talking more about the ones when your right click on a folder view plasmoid, or drop down menus form konqueror.

sorry for the confusion.

That's not really that clear from your idea.
You should clarify it's for "service menus"

Thanks. I changed it, and now its hopefuly clearer.

Service-Menus are just some kind of plugins. You mean general context-menus and menubar-menus I think.

Oh... Anyway, I fixed it. Thanks for pointing that out!

When this is possible, Kickoff-style menus should also be implemented, especially for small devices.

PS:
It is possible with KMenu. But sometimes even QMenus are used. However, at least in kdebase QMenu is primarily used for popup-menus (thank you, grep).

I think this can be added as option under Accessibility in Control Panel: I think would be very useful also for disabled people.

For touchscreen-users (e.g. on N900) Kickoff-style menus would be definitely better.