I want to like pie menus, because it's nice that all the entries are equidistant from the cursor. But I just can't seem to like them. Maybe it's because they

I want to like pie menus, because it's nice that all the entries are equidistant from the cursor. But I just can't seem to like them. Maybe it's because they don't lend themselves to scanning and sorting. It's easy to sort a list of items alphabetically, and it's easy to scan a list by moving my eye down across it, requiring nearly no horizontal eye movement to read the words. But a pie menu does not lend itself so naturally to alphabetical sorting, and scanning requires circular eye movement, which is less economical. It also has seemed to me that pie menus don't lend themselves as well to memorizing where entries are, perhaps because of the sorting issue. I can remember that a word starts with A and is at the top of a list, but remembering where a word belongs on a compass or clock face doesn't seem as natural, unless the associated action is itself directional (up/down/left/right, north/south/east/west etc). Here's an example which comes to mind. Team Fortress 2 has quick-access voice lines which can be played with two keypresses, one to open one of three menus, and another to select a line from the menu. They are displayed in a compact list on the left side of the screen. A newer game coming out soon, Overwatch, also has quick-access voice lines, but they are accessed through a pie menu that covers the entire screen, and items are selected with the mouse. When I haven't played TF2 for a while, I can be running around the map playing the game, hit one of the keys, and scan the list of commands to find the one I want so quickly that I don't even have to think about it; my eye can sweep across the list in one motion. I just open a couple of the menus and then hit the key, all while running around the map, turning my character with the mouse, etc. In Overwatch, this doesn't work at all. If I don't remember where a command is on the pie, I have to move my eye in a circle the diameter of which is nearly the entire height of the screen. This takes significant time and effort compared to scanning a list. It also blocks the screen, and it prevents the mouse from being used to control the character. So, for actions and menus that are primarily directional in nature, and limited in number, I can see pie menus being a natural choice. But for menus that are non-directional, and especially ones that don't lend themselves to memorization, pie menus seem objectively inferior to simple, vertical lists.