Maybe we can make a destination between two cases:
1) cursor is placed somewhere. Here people are interested in
suggestions. The context menu like it is now makes sense
(I would add one entry for the suggestions, in addition to the
shortcut)
2) The user *selected* something explicitly. Here I think we should show
a modified context menu that only has those things
the make sense on the selection. Nobody want to "Debug it" a
variable, or "print it" a syntactically invalid selection...
Hum, this one looks cool. The default action menu is quite long (debugIt, exploreIt, etc...) and making it shorter is a nice touch.
Yes, but unfortunately it doesn't work that way most of the time for the unexperienced.. Learning a UI means knowing where things are. A changing context menu mostly leads to confusion because you struggle finding things you saw before. Those things only make sense if you're already comfortable with the UI and the environment. I think that is one reason we menu entries are often just greyed out. This way you have the orientation because the menu is of the same shape and by seeing greyed out stuff you can immediately learn that some menu entries do not make sense in this context.
Maybe the way it can work is to have this as an option. First grey out things and the expert can switch them off to make disabled entries invisible.