@Bill
> Is this behavior (sharing menu) a feature of osx in general?
Yes, definitely.
In OS X the menubar belongs to the app. Not to the window, as in
MSWin. At least it did when I was programming the Mac in C in the 80s
/ 90s.
Most commercial apps for the Mac, e.g. Firefox, TextEdit, Microsoft
Word, let you create a new window with ⌘N. E.g to edit a second
document. All such windows share the same menubar but window-specific
menu items (⌘C, ⌘V …) work only on the topmost (=active) window.
There's generally a "Window" menu, listing all open windows – the
active window is shown checked: (√). Of course there are apps which
only ever show one window. What the menubar applies-to is never in
doubt.
J602 doesn't obey the rules. Thus: if you launch the Plot package, it
makes a separate window, but when you click on that window – the
menubar vanishes, leaving only the Apple-supplied menus ("Apple" and
"J"). I guess Plot is pretending to be an independent app?
By contrast, JQt does obey the rules - up to a point. All windows
owned by JQt, even user-created ones, share the same menubar. However
the Edit and Term windows chop-and-change menus between them (a big
no-no - you should gray them out, not make them vanish.) That totally
bamboozled me, until I worked out what it was playing at. I was
discovering menu items one day and not finding them the next.
The basic model is that when an app (e.g. DreamWeaver) lets you work
on either a picture or text, say, these aren't 2 different sorts of
window. They're one-and-the-same sort of window, adapted to picture or
text, inapplicable menu items like "Rotate" or "Spelling" being
grayed-out. The menubar is owned by the app, as I said, and is
therefore common to all windows. Apart from J, all Mac apps I've seen
follow this basic model.
Qt, being cross-platform, is a law unto itself, it seems.
On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 12:51 AM, bill lam <[email protected]> wrote:
> Is this behavior (sharing menu) a feature of osx in general?
> On Sep 14, 2015 5:17 AM, "Ian Clark" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> @Chris
>>
>> > Does your repaint include some computation that could have been done up
>> front?
>>
>> It's TABULA. Judged superficially, yes. The toolbar is painted
>> laboriously pixel by pixel, also it's animated. A speedup would be to
>> take a snapshot of the isidraw and use that instead. But it is
>> (planned to be) reconfigurable by the user, so I don't want to get
>> into speedups just yet. Particularly as I'm now badly equipped for
>> cross-platform testing.
>>
>> > How did you do that?
>>
>> Currently a t-table carries free-form info that's displayed in the
>> "Info" tab. It's good in practice to have that optionally in a
>> separate window, so it can be left visible while interacting with the
>> main form, and I've done just that.
>>
>> But when the "Info" window has the focus, instead of the menubar
>> disappearing and being replaced by something vestigial, I can still
>> see the main form's menus. And they all work.
>>
>> TABULA also optionally creates a "plot" window – and the same remarks
>> apply. Bill thinks it's a bug not a feature. But jwplot wouldn't be so
>> useful within an app if it hid the app's menus.
>>
>> > I suppose we should allow redefining the menubar on the fly.
>>
>> I guess most J coders won't need the facility to reconfigure a menu
>> after every user interaction. Only people like me, trying to write
>> professional-looking cross-platform software. Perhaps I simply
>> shouldn't be using Jwd, but working directly with Qt widgets? I can't
>> be far short of my 100th GUI.
>>
>> wd 'set menuitem text "New Caption" ' -would be nice. But destroying
>> and rewriting the whole menubar ought to be fast enough. It is
>> intuitive (using rplc) and totally flexible.
>>
>> Ian
>>
>> On Sun, Sep 13, 2015 at 3:25 PM, chris burke <[email protected]> wrote:
>> >> My form takes a noticeable time to repaint. I don't want to do that.
>> >
>> > I am a little surprised by this. Does your repaint include some
>> computation
>> > that could have been done up front?
>> >
>> >> But I see with JQt it's possible to define two separate forms for the
>> same
>> > app. If one of them specifies no menus, it lets you see the menus of the
>> > other form – even when it's got focus!
>> >
>> > How did you do that?
>> >
>> > I suppose we should allow redefining the menubar on the fly.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On 13 September 2015 at 05:32, Ian Clark <[email protected]> wrote:
>> >
>> >> My form takes a noticeable time to repaint. I don't want to do that.
>> >>
>> >> But I see with JQt it's possible to define two separate forms for the
>> >> same app. If one of them specifies no menus, it lets you see the menus
>> >> of the other form – even when it's got focus! At least, it does on the
>> >> Mac (…under Snow Leopard).
>> >>
>> >> I conjecture it's possible to split my form into a menu-less and a
>> >> menus-only form. The latter will be a lot less pain to recreate – and
>> >> easily reconfigured like this:
>> >>
>> >> wd MYMENUSONLY rplc 'Repeat Last Action' ; 'Repeat "Delete Line"'
>> >>
>> >> The same trick will let me offer an up-to-the-minute MRU list attached
>> >> to the File menu.
>> >>
>> >> Maybe there are gotchers. Maybe it won't work on all platforms. But
>> >> it's worth me doing some experiments. Anyone care to try it with
>> >> MSWin? (I can see a sticky "fellow traveller" being needed for the
>> >> main window, consisting only of a menubar.)
>> >>
>> >> On Sat, Sep 12, 2015 at 2:49 AM, chris burke <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>> >> > You can create a new form to replace the old, positioning exactly over
>> >> the
>> >> > old. This should happen fast enough to be unnoticeable.
>> >> >
>> >> > I cannot think of examples in J8, but this was done in J6, for example
>> >> with
>> >> > the Find and Replace dialogs.
>> >> >
>> >> > On 11 September 2015 at 15:56, bill lam <[email protected]> wrote:
>> >> >
>> >> >> I think these functions are not implemented.
>> >> >> On Sep 12, 2015 4:50 AM, "Ian Clark" <[email protected]> wrote:
>> >> >>
>> >> >> > With jwd in JQt, how do I change the text of a given item in an
>> >> >> > existing set of menus?
>> >> >> >
>> >> >> > E.g. to state precisely what action I'm offering to Undo / Repeat /
>> >> etc?
>> >> >> >
>> >> >> > An allied problem is to add items to an existing menu, e.g. to
>> provide
>> >> >> > a MRU facility.
>> >> >> >
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