Re: Dragging with a 2-button mouse



"Nickolay V. Shmyrev" <nshmyrev yandex ru>
writes:

> В Втр, 09/06/2009 в 16:10 +0100, Rupert Swarbrick пишет:
>> 2) Is this approach to fixing the problem reasonable? Or should it be
>>    something customisable?
>> 3) Do you guys agree that there's actually a problem?
>> (of course, I hope that the answer to the last will be yes...)
>
> I'm not that sure, we have a similar bugs about this in a database:
>
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557956
>
> see also 165155, especially
>
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=165155#c21
>
> But it's mostly a touchscreen problem on small devices. 
>
> For a touchpad on laptop I'd better setup the scrolling area on
> touchpad.

Hi, thanks for the reply!

Firstly, sorry for not looking properly on Bugzilla: I didn't realise
that the problem had already been discussed so much!

Next, was there a decision made by core developers on what the most
intuitive interface for this scrolling-by-dragging would be? If so, I'd
be happy to spend time implementing it.

If there hasn't been a decision, then here are my two pence[1]: I agree
with Bryan Clark's mode-o-phobia and think acroread's various tools
approach is unpleasant. I also really like the drag with mouse 2
behaviour... except when I don't have a mouse 2!

If others agree with those two things, then it seems that the correct
solution is to add another way to activate mouse-2-drag, which doesn't
require mouse 2. When I was writing a trivial fix for my friend, I
chose chording with Ctrl, since (as Wouter Bolsteree points out on bug
165155) Alt starts window drag with e.g. metacity. Also Ctrl is
reasonably close to the touchpad on laptops, which were what I was
thinking about at the time.

I'm not sure whether there's a better solution for e.g. tablet PCs,
which seem also to find this a problem.

Regarding your comment about using the scrolling area on the touchpad,
firstly: yes, I agree. Frankly, for long A4 documents, that's the most
convenient. But my friend was actually looking at a tube map of
London[2], which is large (or at least has small details) and wide, so
you have to do lots of scrolling in strange directions. This is
non-intuitive (although possible) with the scrolling area on the
touchpad, and much easier dragging.

Also, users fresh from Windows-land will "want Acrobat". Clearly, if
there are features in Evince that are different but better, that's
fine. But missing features or features that can't be used and you get
people enabling non-free repositories and apt-get'ting acroread. Which
would be a pity.

I would be really interested in finding a resolution for this problem
(that is, a decision on what to change). Some fix would be better than
none, I think.


Rupert


Footnotes: 
[1]  I'm British
[2]  http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/standard-tube-map.pdf

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