ngraham added a comment.
I agree with @hein that the reason is probably " a poor man's implementation of lazy menus". The thing is, it's an inappropriate application of the feature and isn't necessary here. Allow me to put on my Usability Consultant hat and me illustrate why: Lazy menus are critically important for traditional horizontal menus that have cascading sub-menus. With this pattern, when you move your cursor diagonally to quickly to reach a sub-menu item, it unavoidably has to pass over several other top-level menu items to reach the desired sub-menu item, as illustrated with Kicker and an arrow showing the corsor's path to reach a sub-menu item: F5780979: Kicker.png <https://phabricator.kde.org/F5780979> As you can see, without some logic to handle this case, another top-level item would become activated the moment the cursor leaves the current menu area. But with Kickoff, the user interface is different. Let's look at the same basic task and with an arrow describing the worst-case-scenario cursor movement: F5780980: Kickoff.png <https://phabricator.kde.org/F5780980> Kickoff does not implement the pattern of horizontal menus with cascading sub-menus. Instead, it has a tabbed UI that renders the "lazy menus" feature inapplicable for the following reasons: - The top-level items (the tabs) are large square buttons, not small horizontal rectangles; even with a diagonal movement, there is a good chance the cursor never leaved the area of the current tab - You can always move your mouse vertically to reach the desired item within a tab, because the hover area for entries within tabs take up the whole horizontal space - Even in the worst-case scenario where a user is on a far right tab, doesn't realize that the whole horizontal area is a click target, and moves their cursor slowly and diagonally to reach a left-aligned item that's near the bottom of the list , even then the cursor only just barely clips the area for another tab and the cursor will only be there for a millisecond or two In conclusion, the "lazy menus" pattern only applies to traditional horizontal menus with cascading sub-menus and is inapplicable to Kickoff. Therefore, the long delay that attempts to provide this unneeded feature is itself unneeded. REPOSITORY R119 Plasma Desktop REVISION DETAIL https://phabricator.kde.org/D11848 To: ngraham, #plasma, davidedmundson, abetts Cc: hein, cfeck, plasma-devel, ragreen, Pitel, ZrenBot, lesliezhai, ali-mohamed, jensreuterberg, abetts, sebas, apol, mart
