4 ms·

Menus are supposed to have 7 +/- 2 items. Inside Macintosh Volume 1, if memory serves.

• shadowgovt 4y ago
  Yes. This matches to what was thought (at the time? I'm not sure if research has changed the thinking on this) to be the size of human working memory. 7 ± 2 was believed to be about how much a human could understand with zero layers of abstraction, i.e. "in parallel" (you can imagine your brain has 7 ± 2 registers, though that's a highly inaccurate model). Any larger, and your brain has to build abstractions to reference the item (i.e. item 10 becomes "the last item in the second half of that honkin' huge menu").
  • jasomill 4y ago
    As opposed to "nested two levels deep under one item or another on the File…or was it View…or maybe Window…menu? No? Okay, then try holding down Option…" I still think that searchable menus was one of the killer features of OS X vs. anything else at the time, and it's frankly amazing that the majority of Windows apps still don't have menu search.
    • jbverschoor 4y ago
      This is the some reason I use raycast. I mapped search menu to a global hot key
• mypalmike 4y ago
  Inside Macintosh. What a great set of volumes. I'd forgotten about them.