The Xfce panel's right click menu seems to be serving several master, leading to some minor usability issues. On my (admittedly somewhat stale) SVN build of the panel, the ordinary context menu looks like this: Xfce Panel ---------- Add new item ---------- Properties... About Xfce Help ---------- Lock screen Restart ---------- Exit Some of this functionality is misorganized (why are panel restarts and lock screen together?), some of it is ambiguous (restart and exit are both in the menu, but one restarts the panel alone, the other attempts to exit the desktop), and some of it is inconsistent (Exit exits Xfce, in the standard desktop menu, the same entry is Quit, with an icon). I would suggest a new menu that looks like this, ideally. Part of this is based on assumptions about the panel's future feature set. Xfce Panel ---------- Help Remove this panel Settings Add new item First off, the various locking and exiting functions are removed because they are already available as panel plugins, and also in the menu, which can now be pushed into the panel. Secondly the Restart option has been removed with the hope that out of process plugins and general panel rearchitecting will remove the need to manually tell the panel new plugins are installed. "About Xfce" goes because Xfce is highly modular, and the panel can run without the desktop and vice versa, and because it doesn't really belong in the panel menu (where it belongs, I am not sure.) "Add new item" of course remains, and performs the same function, although perhaps it should add the item in the position marked by the context menu, instead of defaulting to the end. "Add new item" is the bottom entry because in most configurations of the panel (both in terms of what is possibile and user tendency), the bottom position is the most quickly accessible, and "Add new item" the most common action. "Properties..." has been changed to "Settings" because the elipsis was unneeded, and to be more consistent with the rest of the desktop (xfdesktop menu calls them settings, and places the Xfce Panel MCS plugin under a "Settings" submenu, the system button which pulls up the MCS panel is called "Settings"). It is second from the bottom following the Gnome HIG which tries to order items in terms of their likelihood of use. "Remove this panel" is one of the rarer actions, and for safety's sake needs to be difficult to accidentally hit. We specify that it is the panel we are removing to kill any ambiguity between the panel itself and it's plugins, and to make the functionality more discoverable. This assumes we get to multiple panels by 4.4. Help is of course the panel help, least accessed (probably once or twice), but when the user needs it it needs to be prominently displayed, so it's the last item. And, finally, the disabled "Xfce Panel" helps kill ambiguity, just as now, between the panel and it's plugins.
Yeah, I agree. I chose 'Properties', IIRC, because it is what GNOME recommends; If everybody else uses Settings, I'm fine with that. One thing I was considering is to add the panel menu as a submenu to the item menu, which is especially useful if you don't use handles.
This should be mostly fixed now. Thanks.