V8 Mac - "menus" questions and issues

[LewnWorx]

Menus is great. Mostly.

:

1 - It’s not described anywhere that I can find what this means:

What’s the difference between default, and default Mac (other than default Mac has far fewer things available)?

2: There’s no way of MOVING menu items / submenus up or down once created, so if you make a mistake and need to move something you have to start over from scratch:

3: The menus are flaky. The vanish after a rhino restart leaving you only the default menus.

It’s not detailed as to how to save them “permanently” or what that proves is.

I created an align menu for the align and distribute functions, a select by menu for all the various selection types (with submenus) and upon quit and restart they all vanished.

I then started again, with just a utility menu which also vanished after a quit and restart and when I went to create another to generate these screenshots found the prior created utility menu had magically resurfaced (although the other menus did not) and I now have two utility menus, the one I just created for this post, and the one created yesterday.

Yet the other menus I’d very painfully created yesterday (as there was no way to edit them outside of deleting an item or inserting one) are still not present.

So how do we save these so they don’t vanish?

And further, how do we save that externally to load on another machine?

A doc on how to export and import your settings to transplant them to a different machine would be great. I’m aware of some new file format “rbp” or something that is apparently a plist of xml of your customizations but there’s not much in terms of workflow documentation as to how to use them.

[John_Brock]

Assigned to Rhino ctegory

[LewnWorx]

So I updated to 8.1.23318.13002, 2023-11-14. FWIW the check for updates, even when set to service release does NOT find these updates (this on a a real V8 license, not an eval or WIP or whatever)

So it just gets stranger and stranger…

On launch custom menus do not show up in the menubar.

Furthermore they remain invisible if you run “menus” and bring up the editor:

I still don’t. understand, nor can I find any documentation on what the difference is between “default” and “default Mac” under the libraries dropdown.

At any rate, note that non of the custom menus previously created show up, nor or they in the actual menubar menus.

In order to get them to appear I have to create yet another new menu:

Then close the menus dialog and sometimes (but not always) the previously created menus show up along with the new one created specifically to GET them to show up.

It sometimes take s couple trips of bringing the menus dialog up and closing it to get them to show.

Finally I have to bring up menus one LAST time just to delete the “deleteMe” menu I created just to get them to show in the first place.

So that’s the fairly painful workaround for now, and the update did not fix it.

What I’ve learned so far:

1 - Inexplicable “libraries”
When you assign a menu it apparently either gets assigned to “default” or “default Mac” (and there’s no explanation of what the difference is that I can find, and when you add menu items, they likewise come from either “default” and “default Mac” (in both cases there’s a dropdown).

So any top level menus created under “default” only are editable if the “default” dropdown is selected.
Likewise for “default Mac”.

However I can add menu items to a menu from either “default” or “default Mac” to a top level menu created under “default” or “default Mac”.

2 - highlight in the UI
“custom” or user created Top menus show up in blue (most likely to distinguish them from the stock ones).

3 - Plan ahead, as there’s no changes allowed.
There is no ability to move an item once created, which is super painful if you’ve created a one (or more) level deep sub menu and need to move it. Further you can’t edit them once in place (like change the name of a submenu’s title.

4 - Expect weird stuff:

For example on one of these launches to “restore” the menus I had a whole mess of identical menus show up:

right under the services separate shown above. They all had the same title, and were all a single Top level menu I’d created last week and thought was lost, and were now showing up as a submenu under the separator under “services”.

On each subsequent trip into “menus” a new instance of the submenu got added under services. You could select them in the menus editor but that was it. No right click allowed to delete them at all.

STILL UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:

1 - what’s the difference between this “default” and “default Mac” library and what does it mean?
2 - where do these menus, once created get stored?
3 - why don’t they come up at launch without all the gyrations noted above?