A History of Menus Is a Menu of History(pudding.cool)
pudding.cool
A History of Menus Is a Menu of History
https://pudding.cool/2026/06/menu-story/
11 comments
How many people visited the site expecting program UI menus?
My pet peeve about UI menus is how in Windows it has to start with "File".
Want to exit? File -> Exit. Oh, logical.
Why can't they be sane and called it "Program"? Want to change preferences? Program -> Preferences instead of going "if you want to change the preferences, you will be wanting to 'edit the preferences', so it's under Edit. Where Cut, Copy, Paste belong. Logical, no?"
Want to exit? Program -> Exit instead of File -> Exit.
Rant over.
Want to exit? File -> Exit. Oh, logical.
Why can't they be sane and called it "Program"? Want to change preferences? Program -> Preferences instead of going "if you want to change the preferences, you will be wanting to 'edit the preferences', so it's under Edit. Where Cut, Copy, Paste belong. Logical, no?"
Want to exit? Program -> Exit instead of File -> Exit.
Rant over.
Both of these oddities were addressed over 25 years ago when Mac OS X 10.0.0 "Cheetah" was released.
Many of the innovations of Mac OS X have been lost in later macOS, but this one stuck. Instead of saying literally "Program" it is the bolded name of the application. This serves the dual purpose of also identifying which program's window is active. Inside the application menu, you'll find both Preferences (now Settings) and Quit.
I'm trying to figure out if you are a Mac user taking a swipe at Windows or if you are genuinely unaware that more or less exactly what you describe has been implemented in a shipping product for over 25 years.
Many of the innovations of Mac OS X have been lost in later macOS, but this one stuck. Instead of saying literally "Program" it is the bolded name of the application. This serves the dual purpose of also identifying which program's window is active. Inside the application menu, you'll find both Preferences (now Settings) and Quit.
I'm trying to figure out if you are a Mac user taking a swipe at Windows or if you are genuinely unaware that more or less exactly what you describe has been implemented in a shipping product for over 25 years.
For my own programs I also do it this way exactly, because I find that pretty dumb. Preference also gets put under Edit or Options or Somewhere else, which is really annoying. And then you get different settings, that are called differently and are in different places, great.
At least 2 of us :)
Changing .swiper-wrapper { transition-property } from "transform" to "none" makes for a less obnoxious experience, it stops the text cards from flying left-to-right after every swipe (on a 1080p desktop monitor), my eyes were reflexively chasing the text.
The King's Arms Tavern in Colonial Williamsburg, established in 1770, still serves historic items. It's cute to visit a restaurant's website where the menu reads like: "Soupe Another Way $8 — FIRSTLY, take great care that your soup-pots and covers are kept very clean inside and out. Lastly, for all brown and white soups cut the crust of a French roll in round or square pieces, and crisp them before the fire." https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/stay-play/dining/histor...
This would be awesome if I knew what any of the menu items were!
So amazing to travel in time with style, congrats to the author
I thought it was the program's menu bar XD
very cool thx for posting