Schinckel.net

All of the cool kids are talking about Joel Spolsky’s post about disabling menus.

I agree with Gruber et. al., he’s dead wrong. Disabling a menu is a simple, yet powerful method of implicitly informing the user what she can or cannot do at the moment. Hiding menus, a-la Windows/Office “Show only recently used items”, however, it truly evil. This is not even hiding disabled items, just hiding ones that haven’t been used recently. Now, if I use one machine, and then go to another, it doesn’t know which ones I have used recently. Bullshit Incarnate!

Anyway, real users don’t use menus. Other than to learn the keyboard shortcuts.

The Old New Thing had a post way back in 2004, which has a mostly sensible answer: When do you disable an option and when do you remove it? Not strictly dealing with just menu items, but regardless, still logical.