I love Simon's work and artistic sensibility! I posted this earlier about his amazing work with pie menus for Gnome.

Here's done even more amazing pie menu stuff since then, including Fly-Pie -- why don't all web browsers and window managers support this yet??? This stuff is extremely useful, practical, easy to use, and deeply customizable, not just beautiful window dressing, eye candy, and fancy effects.

More Fly-Pie Updates!

https://schneegans.github.io/news/2021/12/02/flypie10

Fly-Pie 8: New default dark theme and support for GNOME 3.36, 3.38, 40, and 41!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9t7hfkE_5w

Fly-Pie 10: A new Clipboard Menu, proper touch support & much more!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGXtckqhEIk

Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective

https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1#ed08

>Spectacular Example: Simon Schneegans’ Gnome-Pie, the slick application launcher for Linux

>I can’t understate how much I like Simon Schneegans’ Gnome-Pie, as well as his bachelor thesis work on the Coral-Menu and the Trace-Menu. Not only is it all slick, beautiful, and elegantly animated, but it’s properly well designed in all the important ways that make it Fitts’s Law Friendly and easy to use, and totally deeply customizable by normal users! It’s a spectacularly useful tour-de-force that Linux desktop users can personalize to their heart’s content.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098179

Pie Menus: A 30-Year Retrospective: Take a Look and Feel Free (medium.com/donhopkins)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17106453

DonHopkins on May 19, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on: Pie Menus: A 30-Year Retrospective: Take a Look an...

I'm very impressed by Simon Schneegans' work on Gnome-Pie:

http://simmesimme.github.io/gnome-pie.html

And especially his delightful thesis work:

Trace-Menu:

https://vimeo.com/51073078

I really love how the little nubs preview the structure of the sub-menus, and how you can roll back to the parent menu because it reserves a slice in the sub-menu to go back, so you don't need to use another mouse button or shift key to browse the menus.

Coral-Menu:

https://vimeo.com/51072812

That looks like a nice visual representation with a way to easily browse all around the tree, into and out of the submenus without clicking! I can't tell from the video if it's based on a click or a timeout. But it looks like it supports browsing and reselection and correcting errors pretty well! (That would be something interesting to measure!)

There's another useful law related to Fitts's law that applies to situations like this, called Steering Law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering_law

The steering law in human–computer interaction and ergonomics is a predictive model of human movement that describes the time required to navigate, or steer, through a 2-dimensional tunnel. The tunnel can be thought of as a path or trajectory on a plane that has an associated thickness or width, where the width can vary along the tunnel. The goal of a steering task is to navigate from one end of the tunnel to the other as quickly as possible, without touching the boundaries of the tunnel. A real-world example that approximates this task is driving a car down a road that may have twists and turns, where the car must navigate the road as quickly as possible without touching the sides of the road. The steering law predicts both the instantaneous speed at which we may navigate the tunnel, and the total time required to navigate the entire tunnel.

The steering law has been independently discovered and studied three times (Rashevsky, 1959; Drury, 1971; Accot and Zhai, 1997). Its most recent discovery has been within the human–computer interaction community, which has resulted in the most general mathematical formulation of the law.

Also here's some interesting stuff about incompatibility with Wayland, and rewriting Gnome-Pie as an extension to the Gnome shell:

http://simmesimme.github.io/news/2017/07/09/gnome-pie-071