The menu that hangs off a folder is a menu read mid-scan, with the eye still
moving down the column, and it was drawn to the measure of a page rather than of
a list: a box wide enough to be a destination, type the size of a heading. A
catalogue's own context menu is a thing passed over on the way somewhere else —
it is sized to its words and to the row it hangs off, and the reader's eye steps
across it without stopping. The type comes down a point, the rows tighten to the
tree's own measure, and the frame around them thickens to a radius the rows
themselves use. The clamp that keeps it in the window follows the smaller box,
so a menu opened near the right or the bottom edge no longer floats an inch off
the pointer for room it does not use.
A row that is being read has exactly one thing to be asked of it — that it stop
— where a row at rest has the reading that brings it up to date. The menu said
RESCAN either way, greyed while a scan was up, which is a command offered and
refused in the same breath. The two never both apply, so the menu now carries
the one the row is actually in: a roll being read offers STOP SCAN and stops
that roll; a roll at rest offers UPDATE... and reads it again. A row with
folders under it grows a third thing — a fold that closes the branch and not
merely the row, because a reader who is done with a tree means the whole of it
shut, and closing only the row they happened to point at leaves the children
standing open underneath it.
The last is a matter of what a row is allowed to claim. Every row of a roll
spanning the tree spun while that roll was being read, so a reader looking at a
tree of a hundred folders saw a hundred rows each insisting it was the one being
read, when the reading had been pointed at one of them. A row now says it is
being read only when it is the row the reading was kept to — the folder it was
pointed at, which for a whole roll is the roll's own row. A tree that says all
of itself is busy when one branch of it is says nothing a reader can trust.
3dtours
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