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marginalia_nu 4 days ago

Traditionally you'd put that in a menu still, just a horizontal one that displays the top version of the hierarchy. This allows you to skip one click, and doesn't significantly eat into the ample screen space.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the hamburger menu is that there is absolutely zero convention for what you put in there, or in which order. You don't know what you'll find in the menu unless you click it. With the old top menu, there were a set of conventions for this; roughly where specific options went, and in which order, and even which hotkeys you'd press to activate the menus. This means that even in an application you were completely unfamiliar with (even hideously complex ones such as an IDE or 3d modelling software), you could fairly easily navigate the application.

tadfisher 4 days ago | parent [-]

I like the hamburger menus, because they are usually one-level deep and contain very few items.

I cannot tell you how many times I want to go into an app's settings, and it takes longer than 20 seconds; some have it in File, some in Edit, others in random menus like "Tools". Further still, the damned menu item itself could be named Settings, Preferences, Options, whatever. Even further, looking at Gimp here, Preferences is one of 25 menu items that I need to scan through. This is not good UX, this is Stockholm Syndrome.

Contrast with Gnome apps: Hamburger -> Preferences, invariably, never takes longer than three seconds to find it.

pndy 4 days ago | parent [-]

Hamburger menu is a good solution for simple and small desktop apps but it's not a good choice to use it for anything complex.

There's this Pinta image editor that since its initial release offered standard menus - for years it looked nearly identical to Paint.NET on which is partially based. In January devs switched to GTK4/libadwaita; new 3.0 release replaced menus with combined hamburger menu which of course cannot be decoupled in any way and which make advanced editing annoying. There's more clicking to do anything unless you decide to learn all shortcuts. And this "learn shortcuts" is quite common answer to hamburger menu complains.

tadfisher 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I just installed Pinta to check it out. That implementation is just bad, you are not supposed to just migrate your menu bar into submenus under the hamburger menu.

If I were to assist with their design, I would eliminate everything that already has a headerbar icon or an on-screen affordance; so most of Files, Edit, View, and Layers is taken care of.

The stuff that remains:

- Quit: superfluous, not present in Gnome apps

- View: borrow the Ephiphany (gnome-web) zoom controls, move Grid, Show/Hide, and Ruler units into a preferences dialog

- Add-ins: Move to a preferences dialog

- Window is useless, they have tabs

- Help can stay

So no surprise that the laziest implementation of a hamburger menu is not good.

pndy 4 days ago | parent [-]

It's kinda funny how Pinta changed while Paint.NET remains same with just minor tweaks to the interface. Luckily devs there never considered utilizing ribbon interface...

In the end I swapped from Pinta to Gimp and Krita because I couldn't stand that interface

dminik 3 days ago | parent [-]

Tbh, at this point I would pay for paint.NET on Linux.

Pinta is interesting, but the UI is terrible. Did we really have to remove the resize handles? They're there when adding shapes, but not when manipulating pixels/selection? Half the options I need being hidden in a hamburger menu isn't great either.

Gimp is gimp. I don't need Photoshop. And I don't want a Photoshop level of a learning curve.

Krita is interesting, but it seems to be aimed at drawing. I struggled to copy the color code from an image. By default my eyes are drawn to the massive advanced color selector on the right, but it's a trap. You actually need the tiny color selector in the top bar. It shouldn't be this hard.

I need a subset of image manipulation features in my work and each tool has a different one.

dismalaf 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

While Pinta uses (and abuses) GTK4, it has nothing to do with Gnome.

Inkscape is also a GTK app that follows Gnome guidelines, and every menu and tool is out in the open. No "hamburger" menus anywhere.

dminik 3 days ago | parent [-]

I was under the impression that Inkscape explicitly doesn't follow the gnome guidelines.

That's why every few months, there's a proposal to redesign it which trades usability for minimalism. Here's one I pulled from a random Google search:

https://gitlab.com/inkscape/ux/-/issues/236

dismalaf 3 days ago | parent [-]

https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Inkscape_invariants

They claim it's one of the cornerstones of their project. Who am I to argue.

Personally, I like how functional Inkscape's UI is AND how minimal Files is, for example..