"People for years have been explaining to me very patiently that in this era of giant screen monitors, we just have to do something about those menu bars way up there at the top of the screen" -- Tog, column 15, May 1990
He then describes an experiment where he used a 21-inch monitor and a 13-inch monitor attached to a Mac, and had subjects change the color of folders on one screen by selecting menu items on the other. Even compared to a pop-up menu right under the mouse, the far-off edge menu bar was still faster.
Objects on a 2018 MacBook Pro can be 70% further apart (D) than on a 1984 Macintosh, but the edges of the screen are still infinitely big (W).
If you have a "large" screen, I would contend that having a dedicated menu button on your mouse/trackpad/trackball/pen is the best possible thing for any user who isn't a complete novice. Don't wave the pointer somewhere else, make the menu come to you.
If you can't do that for whatever reason, then having a high-acceleration pointer that can be flung all the way against an edge is next best. Going back to where you were, though, will be relatively hard.
The 'make the menu come to you' approach would make sense for large and/or unusually controlled screens. Take game consoles and their directional controllers or old style mobile phones with numeric keypad for example, they made most menus pop up in context-menu style.
I imagine something like holding a menu button which acts like a modifier key that also pops up a menu on-screen. Then, using a physical layout on the screen that matches the layout of the buttons on your controller or pointing device to navigate/select items of choice without using x,y pointing systems such as the mouse arrow. This does however create a new problem: how to decide where the menu is going to overlap over the stuff you were working on?
He then describes an experiment where he used a 21-inch monitor and a 13-inch monitor attached to a Mac, and had subjects change the color of folders on one screen by selecting menu items on the other. Even compared to a pop-up menu right under the mouse, the far-off edge menu bar was still faster.
Objects on a 2018 MacBook Pro can be 70% further apart (D) than on a 1984 Macintosh, but the edges of the screen are still infinitely big (W).