Why Your App's 'File' Menu Has Nothing to Do with Files
Your "File" Menu Isn't About Files
A developer audits 35 macOS apps and finds that the 'File' menu is almost always a misnomer. From Calendar and Messages to Spotify and Weather, the menu items rarely involve actual files. The post suggests better names like 'Event', 'Chat', or 'Playlist', and highlights honorable mentions like Finder and Terminal that get it right.
If one item on a list accounts for naming something, I guess we need to reconsider naming meals.
- graypegg
Contrapoint: your application isn't special enough to break patterns.
Opening a calendar application, clicking on the "Event" menu, and being given options to make a new calendar makes as much sense as opening the "File" menu and seeing the same options.
If you split it up so any menu item that verbs a noun, had a top level menu named by that noun, you'd end up with New/Delete/etc actions being split into many menus, which feels just as wrong.
"File" works because of inertia, and people have a feeling of what should be in there:
- new thing
- save thing
- copy thing
- open another thing
- rename thing
- send this thing somewhere
- import a thing in another format/export thing in another format
- close thing, but don't quit, send me to some start screen please
It's vaguely related to the file/container you're looking at, but I wouldn't even say that's hugely important to most people's use of the file menu. It just has to have those things in it because honestly, it's pretty consistent. Other than a few examples in the article (Find My with it's always-disabled options, Reeder clearly having already moved all of it's menus into Account/Subscription/Item nouns) the file menu lines up with what I expect to be in it. Maybe that's me stuck inside my own bubble?
- yodon
That's how language works. Eavesdropping once referred to water dropping off the eaves of a roof. There is mostly no "log" that "logging in" writes to. The menu itself has nothing to do with food or eating. Is the meaning clear to contemporary readers or listeners? Yes.
- freehorse
- Notes: note
- Messages: message
- Passwords: password
- Reminders: reminder
[...]
Most of propositions are restatement of the app name or theme thereof, and thus do not seem to be very helpful (everything in a notes app has to do with "notes" one way or another). Plus, having naming conventions change per app is confusing. The "file" menu is usually about "(primary) actions" and "I/O", so I would rename all of this as "actions". However, "file menu" has been associated with these kind of actions, and it is fair to consider a liberal interpretation of the word broadly referring to organisation of data (wherever this lies) and creation of new data structures within the app (not just filesystem level).
- keito
It's an interesting point, but I think the benefit of having actions related to the main object(s) that each application deals with in a standardized place that people expect ("File") outweighs the cognitive load of needing to figure out where those actions might be in every single program.
- quirkot
It's a real Chesterton's fence situation. There's a lot of latent information contained in a tradition of calling the first menu item "File" including expectations around what can be found there.
You could also say it pierced the metaphor and no longer refers to files on a computer, but to the concept of filing that computer files were named after.