Custom Fixed Menu Location

[Ka1zza]

Description

This might already be being worked on, but Fly-Pie had a touch friendly mode. The menu could be positioned anywhere on the screen rather than just centred. Is it possible to allow custom fixed positions of menus? This would aid usability on touch and pen devices. Especially if it is not possible to track pen cursor location.

Thanks for all the hard work!!

Affected Desktop Environments

All

Additional Information

Happy to help with testing for Pen and Touch on Win 11 and Gnome (Wayland).

[Schneegans]

Hi there! Thanks for the suggestion, but I do not fully understand what you want to achieve here.

Fly-Pie has a feature called Touch Buttons which shows a always-on-the-top button on your screen which can be used to open a menu. Do you refer to this?

While this could be added to Kando as well, it's pretty low on my priority list. It will be quite a lot of work and I think that there are various third-party tools which can be used to achieve something similar. On Windows, for instance TabletFriend looks promising.

[Ka1zza]

Thanks for the reply. Sorry to cause confusion by mentioning the touch button. I was more asking if it was possible to have custom locations for the menu to appear. Currently the menu can be centred on the screen or follow mouse cursor. Would it be possible to have the menu appear at a specific screen position such as bottom-right, top-left etc?

[in4matix]

Yes please!

[Schneegans]

Technically, this would be possible. But I am not sure how often something like this would be required? If possible, opening at the pointer should be better in almost all cases. Of course there may be cases where a pointer location is not really available... but why would you prefer an off-center position? When starting from the center, you have the maximum possible travel distance in all directions.

And we would need to find a way to offer this very advanced feature in the UI without making it more complicated for new users.

[Schneegans]

@in4matix could you please either open a separate issue or discussion, or present your idea on the discord server?

[in4matix]

@Schneegans yes sure

[Ka1zza]

Technically, this would be possible. But I am not sure how often something like this would be required? If possible, opening at the pointer should be better in almost all cases. Of course there may be cases where a pointer location is not really available... but why would you prefer an off-center position? When starting from the center, you have the maximum possible travel distance in all directions.

This is related to my issue with windows ink #545. Pointer location isn't available. Having a menu that can be position towards the edge of a display would aid in usability for touch and pen devices. Eg. when taking notes I tend to write on the right side of the display and have my references on the left. Positioning the menu towards the lower right of the screen would reduce travel time. With the customization we have in menus one could even make a menu that works right on the edge of a display which would be great for touch. There are apps that let you map a two or three finger tap to trigger a hotkey thus opening the menu.

And we would need to find a way to offer this very advanced feature in the UI without making it more complicated for new users.

Perhaps we could just have a third option there that uses a percentage of the X and Y screen res.