[Lazarus] New menu designer. which style do you prefer?

Juha Manninen juha.manninen62 at gmail.com
Sun Jan 17 13:24:52 CET 2016


On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 1:11 AM, Howard <hdpc at talktalk.net> wrote:

> You'll realise I'm on a learning curve. This is my first significant code
> contribution to an open source project. I actually never thought I had the
> skill to offer a new menueditor. It was a forum comment by the late
> BigChimp some years ago about the previous menueditor which first got me
> thinking about its shortcomings, why it was so difficult to
> improve/maintain, and how a replacement might be designed to be better in
> that respect; and several developers said a complete rewrite was the only
> way forward. Months became years and no one as far as I could see was
> working on a replacement. So I decided to bite the bullet, and started to
> look at relevant bits of the IDE code (much of which I still don't
> understand). I've been learning on the job, as you plainly see...
>

Talking about BigChimp, there is an open bug report from him:
  http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=25457
I think it can be resolved already. He may have confused Name and Caption.
The visible property is Caption and the WYSIWYG editor must modify it,
which it now does. Other properties should be left for Object Inspector.
The KISS principle applies here, too.

Anyway we have a good situation now as many people work on the menu
designer. At least its structure allows it to be modified. The old menu
designer was weird. Many people tried to improve it but finally gave up and
noted that it should be rewritten. Usually I can refactor code to make it
more modular and easier to maintain but with that code I didn't know how.
So yes, this had to be done. I believe after some initial pain we get a
good menu designer.

Juha
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