[kepler-dev] Bring to Front vs Move to first menu choice

[Edward A. Lee]

Oops... These menus should have the same labels (the menu bar menu and
the context menu).  I just checked, and they both do the same thing,
and the Ctrl-F and Ctrl-B bindings work.  To check this, create decorative
objects in a Vergil screen (graphical elements like rectangles, text, etc.)
and the select them and select Ctrl-F or Ctrl-B.

For the record, "Send to Back" seems more user friendly, but
"Move to first(back)" is more technically correct.  The fact is,
you can invoke these commands on any attribute, and it will affect not
just how they are rendered, but also in what order they appear when
you edit the parameters of the container...

I agree with what Laura will inevitably think (but is probably too
polite to say :-) that this is pretty confusing... But it will also be
confusing if one chooses "Send to Back" on a parameter, and it has
the side effect of putting it first in the Configure dialog...
I don't have a good answer here...  Perhaps we should just go with
"Send to Back" and hope nobody notices :-)

Note that I recently made it so decorative elements (which are just
attributes with icons) would appear behind or ahead of objects
of an entirely different type (e.g., text can be put behind or in front of
an actor). This didn't used to be the case...

Edward

At 12:33 PM 12/19/2005 -0800, Christopher Brooks wrote:
>Edward writes:
> >    Note that I would not use Ctrl+F for Full Screen...
> >    It is currently bound to "bring to front", which is a fairly common
> >    choice in graphics software, and is far more commonly needed than
> >    Full Screen.
>
>Ok, this is a little confusing.
>
>What we have now is the Edit menu (above the toolbar) has
>Send to Back   (Ctrl+B)
>Bring to Front (Ctrl+F)
>(These are defined in vergil/basic/BasicGraphFrame.java)
>
>The context menu for an actor has
>Move to first(back)
>Move to last(front)
>(These are defined in vergil/kernel/AttributeController.java)
>
>It seems to me that these are one and the same, but I guess they are
>not?  How are these different?
>
>What got me started was I was expecting "Move to first (back)" to have
>a Ctrl+F shortcut, but it did not.
>
>Is there any way we can combine something here?
>
>_Christopher
>

------------
Edward A. Lee
Professor, Chair of the EE Division, Associate Chair of EECS
231 Cory Hall, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720
phone: 510-642-0253 or 510-642-0455, fax: 510-642-2845
eal at eecs.Berkeley.EDU, http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/~eal