Use case or problem
Spellcheck words underlined in red, when right-clicked, present spelling suggestions and the Add to Dictionary function at the top of the right-click context menu. When the cursor position is far enough down on the screen where the menu can be fully formed above the cursor, it is presented aligned from the bottom of the menu.
For me, this is about 40% from the top of the screen.
As a result, for any mispelled word I right-click on, if it’s 60% from the bottom of the screen or less, the recommendations are now at or close to the top of the screen. This causes me to traverse up and down the height of the screen for. every. word. I specifically am not great at spelling and I write technical documents all day, so it’s not uncommon for me to have 30-60 spell check finds in a topic. In my particular experience, I’ve almost never had the spellcheck menu generate from top-down because I’m almost always taking care of spelling corrections in an editing pass or as I’m typing, which means my cursor is almost never above the vertical center line of the screen.
“Just use the keyboard”
When working on the computer, I use my left hand on the keyboard on the left side and the mouse on the right. Any key press needed on the right side of the first key of the right side home row (roughly from F6, U, J, N and to the right on English QWERTY key arrangement) is going to cause me to have to re-arrange my hands and break my mental flow. This is something I strongly avoid as it greatly impacts my speed and causes a significant amount of decision / form fatigue each time it happens.
This breaks the flow of editing just as much as scrolling to the top of the screen constantly, as I need to either take my hand of the mouse or move my left hand across the entire keyboard to the right. This may be less of a problem for left-handed people, but honestly most left handed people I’ve seen (quite a few, honestly, three in my immediate family and many more during years of help-desk roles) tend to use keyboards and mice in right-handed configurations.
Proposed solution
Preferred direct solution for only the Spellcheck-specific menu option:
I’d like the spell check suggestion locations on the right click menu to be inversed when the when it is generated bottom-up, so that the suggestions are always closest to the cursor location.
When from top-down:
(CURSOR LOC)
<Spelling Suggestions>
--
Add to Dictionary
--
<Rest of menu>
When from bottom-up:
<Rest of menu>
--
Add to Dictionary
--
<Spelling Suggestions>
(CURSOR LOC)
Fancy-Pants Solution that could be interesting in long run:
Note: When I have my solution architect / software engineer hat on, this idea has all the hallmarks of “way more trouble and error prone/testing needed than it’s worth by far”, but on the off-chance that there’s a way to reasonably approach this in your platform without it being an enormous pile of unwieldy conditionals and exponential testing bloat, I figured I would suggest it.
Allow the right-click context menu to be context-driven and have the order of “feature sections” and “add-on pieces” be customizable.
Current workaround (optional)
Using arrow keys (up/down) + Enter after the context menu is launched.
Please refer above to the “Just use the keyboard” reasons why this is worse than the mouse position for me (and likely many other people).
Related feature requests (optional)
Could not find any.