Citrus: Where things go

Commands in Citrus are organized a bit differently than how they’re organized now. The new organization aims to bring more logic to the whole organizational structure and weed out vague categories like “Tools” or “Edit”, as well as bad categorization (e.g. how the “File” menu is used to house commands that aren’t related to the current file).

Also, menus are now contextual, which means that you no longer get grayed-out menus and commands, but rather these inapplicable commands and menus are hidden by default.

The new menus are:

LibreOffice

The LibreOffice menu includes everything related to the application as a whole. It features commands for creating and opening documents (“New“, “Open“, “Open Recent“), managing open windows, and using and managing the application (“Options“, “Help“, “About“, “Extensions“, “Quit“).

File

This menu houses everything specific to the currently open file. It includes commands for file output (“Save“, “Export“, “Print“, “Rename“, “Preview in browser“), file history (“Undo“, “Redo“, “Repeat“, “Versions“, “Track changes“), and other commands that have to do with the whole file (“Statistics“, “Select all“, “Refresh“).

Window

Everything specific to the current window goes under this menu. Basically, it includes all the commands for showing UI elements in the current window (“Show Ruler“, “Show Navigator“, “Toolbars“, …) and commands concerning window modes (“Zoom“, “Full screen“, “Selection mode“, “Outline“, etc.).

This menu is more like the old View menu rather than the old Window menu, but as it is placed where the View menu used to be, and as it’s immediately obvious what this menu does just by looking at its commands, it shouldn’t be too hard to get used to this menu.

Insert

Just like now, Insert is a menu for inserting stuff into the document. Paste is now the first item under Insert (because when you paste, you insert stuff).

Contextual menus

Then you get contextual menus. When you open Writer, with nothing selected, you get three contextual menus: Pages, Paragraph, and Text. If you were to select an image, you’d no longer get a Text menu, but you’d get an Image menu instead. You might not even get a Paragraph menu — that depends on whether the selected image floats or behaves like a character.

Pages contains commands that pertain to the current page group. It basically includes all of the commands from the current “Page…” dialog, as well as Page styles. As long as you’re in Writer, you’ll get the Pages menu. If you were in Impress, you’d get the Slide menu instead.

The Paragraph menu also contains all the commands from the “Paragraph…” dialog and Paragraph styles, as well as “Bullets and Numbering…”

The Text menu includes character formatting options, styles, hyperlink and language options, as well as “Cut” and “Copy“.

Cut and Copy are now under contextual menus. If you’re working with a text in a chart, you can copy some selected text from the chart under the Text menu or copy the whole chart under the Chart menu. If nothing is selected, you don’t get Cut/Copy.

That’s the jist of it. I know I left out a ton of stuff, so feel free to post comments with questions.