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In the Tools menu, menu items appear and disappear depending on the selected window and node. This behavior clearly means the menu items are harder to discover. It is also very hard to make sure the menu items appear properly ordered, as we would need to design and verify it for all possible contexts. This is the proposal to make the menu static, it means all items are always visible and disabled if they are not applicable in the given context. To make it happen, first we need to asses how many items we currently put into the Tools menu for the full IDE distribution. I hope the dev team could do a search through the source base to identify all actions. Then designers should come up with proper wording and ordering in the permanent UI spec. It's possible there would be too many items to fit into the Tools menu at once. If it's true, we would need to come up with some other solution which would depend on the list of all existing menu items in the menu.
reassigning back to HIE - please provide the list of items that should appear in static tools menu
Hasn't this already been implemented? Isn't tools menu static now?
I'll answer my own question: No, it hasn't. Standa, is it possible to somehow get a list of all the items which can appear in the tools menu? Because to find them manually would mean to try all possible contexts of the IDE .. which seems unfeasible.
Created attachment 83492 [details] items which can appear in tools menu
For future reference, I've attached (thanks to Standa) a list of items which can appear in the tools menu. However, this list may not necessarily be complete, as items can be displayed also dynamically.
Tools menu items appear/disappear only when appropriate modules are activated/deactivated.