Should Undo/Redo Selection be in the menus?

[njx]

The Edit menu is pretty long already, but it seems like it would make sense to add these to the menu.

[lkcampbell]

@njx, maybe it's time to consider introducing a Find menu and move some of those Find commands out of the Edit menu to make some more room.

[TomMalbran]

@lkcampbell Larz gave us the ok to create a search menu or a selection menu (or both?) (#6084 (comment)). But I haven't had time to do it. If you want to make a PR go ahead.

[zaggino]

when talking about the menus ... today (while eating) I seriously missed the right click -> copy, right click -> paste 😄

[njx]

@lkcampbell Yup, I'd be good with that. The overall length of the menu would be improved if we had submenus, but I think even when we get around to submenus it still might make sense to have a separate Find menu, and it's pretty common in other editors I think.

@zaggino If I recall correctly, the issue there is that we can't actually invoke copy/paste operations from JS due to browser security. (There might be some way to turn that off in CEF, not sure.)

[TomMalbran]

@njx That is right it cant be done with pure JS. There is an extension does adds those items to the editor context menu using node. Another alternative could be to implement brackets.app apis in the shell.

[njx]

Yup, good point - either of those alternatives would work in the shell.

Awhile ago I remember wondering how Google managed this in Google Docs. Turns out that if you invoke Copy from the context menu, it asks you to install the Google Drive extension so that it can access the clipboard :)

[lkcampbell]

@njx, I submitted a PR for #6084, so you should have a bit more room in the Edit menu soon.

[pthiess]

@lkcampbell Looks like you would be a great owner for this one too, not sure about your bandwidth

[pthiess]

#7488

[lkcampbell]

@pthiess, yes, I will take a look.

[lkcampbell]

@njx, I know you don't want to introduce another top level menu in the same Sprint that we introduce the new Find menu; however, these commands might be good candidates for a Select or Selection menu for Sprint 40.

We could move the entire third section (five commands) out of the Edit menu and add these two for a total of seven commands. It would really get the Edit menu slimmed down again.

Or, alternative plan, I can just add these two commands to the Edit menu right now and we can reassess at a later time.

Either way, let me know what you want me to do with this issue.

[njx]

I'm not totally opposed to the idea, but I think the other question is whether we would design this differently once we have submenus. Would we still want the selection items as a top-level menu, or would we consider just making it a submenu?

Looking at http://sixrevisions.com/web-development/the-15-most-popular-text-editors-for-developers/ (which is admittedly Windows-heavy), it looks like many of them have a separate Find/Search menu as we do now, but none of them have a separate Selection menu. On the Mac, it looks like Sublime has a separate Selection menu, but TextMate doesn't (it uses a submenu in Edit).

So...for now I would be tempted to just add Undo/Redo Selection to the Edit menu, and then revisit the issue when we have submenus. @gruehle pointed out that we actually have some native support for submenus now, so it might not take that much to carry them across the finish line. @peterflynn is going to move the submenu card to Nominations to see if we can get them in soon.