Marking menu

Press and hold on the canvas and a ring of commands appears around the pointer, each in its own direction. Move toward one and release, and it runs. Now make the same movement quickly, before the ring has had time to appear, and the command runs anyway: the interface saw a stroke to the north and that is all it needed. That is the whole idea. The menu and the gesture are the same gesture, one performed slowly enough to need help and one performed fast enough not to.

What makes this more than a novelty is that the slow version teaches the fast one. Gordon Kurtenbach and William Buxton set out the argument and the evidence: because the item’s position in the ring is its direction, every hesitant trip through the visible menu is also a rehearsal of the mark, and people drift from one to the other without being told there is another way. Most interfaces make their expert path a separate thing to learn, printed in a menu as a keyboard shortcut nobody reads. A marking menu makes the expert path the same movement, which is why the pattern is sometimes described as self revealing.

Direction is also easier to remember than position. A list makes you find the item you want among its neighbours, and the answer is a location on a moving surface. A ring makes the answer a heading, up, right, down, left, and the hand holds that far better than the eye holds a row number. The cost is that the vocabulary is small: four directions are read reliably, eight with care, and anything past that starts trading accuracy for breadth. Depth is bought instead with compound marks, a stroke that turns a corner, which is powerful and genuinely hard to learn.

Set against its neighbours: a context menu is a list that appears at the pointer to be read and then clicked, and it has no faster form. A radial menu is the component shape on its own, a ring of items with no mark behind it. The marking menu is the one that promises the ring can be skipped. The costs are the ones any press and hold carries, since the hold has to be free of other meanings on that surface, and the ring needs somewhere to be drawn that will not run off the edge of the window.