Guest Additions context menu to make seamless mode more usable.

[Paul Klapperich]

There are many actions that can only be done through the VirtualBox menu bar (Machine, Devices, Help). While the items in the Machine menu all have hot keys associated, nothing in the devices menu does. This means that changing a USB device, cdrom image, etc requires exiting seamless mode, making the change, and re-entering seamless mode. This process usually affects the sizes and positions of all open windows and is generally more time consuming than it need be.

Currently the Guest Additions icon sits in the system tray and does absolutely nothing. There is no way to interact and it is a completely useless icon, save for providing the version number of the installed Guest Additions package.

Guest additions should contain some sort of GUI. Immediately a context menu responding to a right click could simply clone the Machine, Device, and Help menus present in the UI. This would allow the same level of control from within seamless mode that one enjoys outside of seamless mode removing the need to switch modes to make changes. Additionally, it does something useful with an otherwise unused expected point of interaction.

[Michael Thayer]

You might want to try the combination "Host+Home" while in seamless mode, which brings up the VirtualBox menu.

[Paul Klapperich]

Thanks. I found that out after filing this bug report. I still stand behind this as a good idea as hotkeys are easy to forget and non-obvious whereas the systray icon is an obvious point of interaction for this sort of thing. Additionally, since Host+Home pops up the context menu at the mouse location, most of the work is already done. Simply make right click on the guest additions icon trigger the same function that's triggered by Host+Home.

[Frank Mehnert]

There is a mini toolbar which was introduced some VBox releases ago.