Navigation in Menu is bad (Cinnamon 1.6.7)

[VolMi]

Please have a look at this great post.
It is about interaction with drop-down menus and how they can suck.

Unfortunately, Cinnamon's Menu is not a shiny example for user experience when you really use it:
Hover over a category, say Multimedia, then try to take the shortest way to a program on the top or bottom of the list. It disappears because Menu sillily assumes your want to see the next category.

Amazon solved this very elegantly and the above blog post is about the new jQuery plugin jQuery-menu-aim which does the same and is licensed under the MIT license.

It would be great if this solution would make it into Cinnamon's Menu.

some further reading

This is of course no new finding, nor is Amazon the inventor of this method. People posted very nice links for further reading, which I append here.

• about Menus on Mac OS (X) (from 1999!)
• Making Menus Escapable
• Fitts's Law

[mtwebster]

Don't expect jquery to make it into the menu applet, but this sort of behavior would be relatively simple to implement.

[gauravjuvekar]

+1 This is really annoying.

[VolMi]

I don't mind how this is implemented, of course. As long as the menu behaves more kindly, I would be happy.

While the menu always pleased me visually, I never really liked to use it (except for the search field) and could not tell why. This issue is the reason. All the annoyance was always due to the disappering items, I only did not notice it conciously, instead I was only obscurely annoyed.

[mdchaves]

Very interesting suggestion. Direction detection is a very smart solution. Including delay would be the worst possible alternative and it would ruin the menu.
It would be great if this feature was implemented in conjunction with the auto-scrolling pull request (#1465)

[mtwebster]

It'll definitely be some sort of directional detection, I hate delays.

[Lusito]

There is a setting called "menu hover delay", which prevents such quick changes.
Not sure if this solves it, I don't have that issue. I usually just move the mouse close to the right border of the categories, so, there usually is no overlapping.

[gauravjuvekar]

There is a setting called "menu hover delay",

@mtwebster is right.

[Garibaldo]

Please, don't add "menu hover delay" to the menu. That affects badly the responsiveness of the menu. I'm sure "directional detection" is enough to solve the issue.

[Lusito]

It already is added, it's just optional.