Everyone,
I am seeing a lot of misunderstanding here about what some of the options do.
Let me try and help clear it up.
First, the menu bar and the toolbar are totally separate things. There are not currently any options which simultaneously affect both of them.
(What Rick calls the "icon bar" is what the rest of us call the toolbar, I believe.)
- The toolbar is always visible in normal/non-fullscreen mode.
- In fullscreen mode, it is controlled by the checkbox "Show Toolbar in Fullscreen Mode".
(Perhaps it would be clearer to invert this, and make it "Hide Toolbar in Fullscreen Mode"... but anyway, I am puzzled as to why it is possible to hide it in fullscreen mode and not normal mode. I will come back to this below.)
- The menu bar is hidden by default (except on OS X).
- The checkbox "Show Menu Bar" makes it visible (permanently, until the checkbox is unchecked). In the current beta it hides in fullscreen mode, but in latest master it has been changed to stay visible in fullscreen.
- If the menu bar is not visible, pressing Alt makes it appear temporarily. Performing any other action hides it again. This is standard behaviour on Windows and Linux for many programs which have normally-hidden menu bars.
(Gilletarom, I don't think this should be changed to use an Alt+something combination, as that would be non-standard and people wouldn't find it. Just using Alt is standard and many programs do the same.)
Is any of this unclear from the labels in the settings?
How could it be made clearer?
Note: Gerhard/CarCode is wrong, on OS X the menu bar
does not become visible when moving the mouse to the top of the screen in
OpenCPN. This applies to most apps, but
not OpenCPN. Gerhard has a custom build of OpenCPN, using newer version of wxWidgets, and uses the standard OS X fullscreen behaviour. The official builds of OpenCPN do not behave in this way.
I hope all this helps clear up some of the confusion.
---
Regarding the ability to hide the toolbar...
I am in favour of this, particularly as people can now choose to use the menu bar instead which takes less space. (I know some people find it hard to use menus at sea. Some of us find it easy though, so an option would be nice.)
I currently keep the toolbar visible, even in fullscreen, but with the menu bar I would probably hide it if I had the option. I almost exclusively use keyboard shortcuts anyway, and for the few things where I can't remember the shortcuts the menus will suffice so I don't need the massive toolbar onscreen.
That said, I understand the
safety implications some people have mentioned if both the toolbar and menu bar are hidden. So perhaps it should only be possible to hide one at a time... I don't know. I don't claim to have the "right answer", if such a thing even exists...
Cheers,
Caesar