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Comment by mchahn | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone other than me have a cognitive problem with pie menus? For some reason I have to slow down and think about what I should do to use them. I have tried and tried and it doesn't get easy. I use autodesk daily and it offers pie menus everywhere but I avoid them.

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For me at least, I believe part of the reason is the circular visual layout of the menu, which makes it hard to scan. With traditional context menus, I usually develop muscle memory that helps me aim to the desired option. With pie menus this is not needed, but scanning the available options feels weird, as there's no clear left-to-right reading sequence.

I would love a "square pie" menu that combined the improvements of pie menus (click-and-drag to select, infinite size) with a square, table-like layout surrounding the cursor above, below and to the sides of the initial mouse click point.

Something like this (where <¬ is the mouse cursor):

  .___.___.___
  |  A |  B |  C  |
  |___|___|___|
  |  D | <¬ | E  |
  |___|___|___|
  |       F           |
  |__________|
  |       G          |
  |__________|

Xmonad has something called grid select, which works kind of like a combination of pie menus and a grid, while also being keyboard navigable(I use vim keybindings hjkl).

http://maskray.me/static/xmonad-grid-select.jpg

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/xmonad-contrib-0.13/docs...

This is a step in the right direction, although still a little bit too scary for normal users accustomed to classic context menus:

https://addons.mozilla.org/mn/firefox/addon/radialcontext-mz...

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