[dsr_]

Depends on two things:

1. How fast can you get the pointer to the menu?

2. How easy is it to get the right item?

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.

[oneplane]

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?