Remove “Show all Menu Items” From Photoshop CS4 at Chris Koerner
Despite using Photoshop CS3 since it came out, I’d never noticed this astonishingly-annoying “feature”, which has driven me mad since installing CS4 (apparently it was in CS3, too): it hides many of its menu commands, under the delusion that users are too stupid to be allowed convenient access to them.
They must’ve changed what menu items are hidden by default, because I would’ve noticed if the Revert command or the View/Proof Setup commands were gone under CS3. They’re certainly not available until you choose “Show All Menu Items” from the bottom of the File and View menus, respectively.
Some warning would’ve been nice. Or a universal preference (’Would you like idiot Photoshop or regular Photoshop?). Despite going over the Preferences dialog carefully — and it hasn’t changed radically since Photoshop 3 (no, I don’t mean CS3, I mean Photoshop 3.0), I could find no such setting.
At any rate, here’s the solution, if you don’t fancy re-enabling them all by hand:
Like Koerner, I find myself wondering why this wasn’t done properly:
- Application-wide preference?
- Question during installation or first-run?
- Take a peek at CS3’s prefs file to see if I’ve used “advanced” settings?
- Take note of the fact that I’ve purchased Photoshop, not “fingerpainting for dummies”?
- Notice that I’ve selected “Show All Menu Items” five times — in the last three minutes?
This is not shit that shareware authors get wrong very often; they’d have a mutiny on their hands.
For what it’s worth, I’m not even among those who hated the CS4 installers (on individual workstations, mind you). No, they don’t follow either platform’s standards, but they actually installed everything the first time, and they weren’t that hard to figure out. I do fully appreciate and endorse John Welch’s position on everything Adobe, though: Adobe’s software used to be a sheer pleasure to use. Now I merely tolerate it. And that’s when it’s working reasonably well.
Christopher Mackay Said,
January 15, 2009 @ 11:50 am
Just to comment on my own post, I was working at a client’s this week, and their new CS4 install did not feature the abbreviated menus. They had no idea they existed, so it seems unlikely they made any configuration changes on their own, although I only spoke with one of several users of the system.
Random.
Chris Said,
February 14, 2009 @ 9:38 pm
There is no need for this work around!
You can change this feature under the edit>menus (of course you will have to show all to see menus) select the menu tab and then change it from basic to photoshop defaults and all your menu items will appear.
Fred Said,
March 15, 2009 @ 3:05 pm
Thanks for posting the solution, Chris. This was driving me bonkers. How many times do software designers have to learn the lesson that simplified/advanced interfaces are always a failure.
If the UI is designed right in the first place, users should be able to easily access common tasks and logically, gracefully discover advanced settings for less common tasks.
Sheesh. What does a UI designer make at Adobe? I bet it’s too much.