Re: strokes support for GNOME

[Dan Nicolaescu <dann ics uci edu>]

Havoc Pennington <rhp@zirx.pair.com> writes:

  > Hi,
  > 
  > I think it would be great as long as it's implemented in some non-hacky
  > way.
  > 
  > I wouldn't like to see it if it's going to be cruftily grafted in to
  > gnome-libs. In that case I think it's better to let applications include
  > it rather than putting it in the library. We already have a bunch of junk
  > in libgnomeui that needs to be removed, and interface consistency is a
  > problem for us. In particular gnome-app-helper does not need more features
  > added to its shaky foundation...
  > 
  > Among the questions to answer: how will stroke bindings work - like
  > accelerators, or more generic? What about apps that already use the middle
  > button? What changes to the Gtk main loop are required to implement this?
  > (I guess you'd have to intercept all middle button presses, much as the
  > gtk_grab_add() code works now...) Is it really useful for all apps, or
  > would it be better to just add it to apps where it makes sense?

Well, I think it would be a good idea to first aggree on what do we
want from strokes before talking about implementation details:
 
	- do we aggree that strokes is a useful feature that would be
	nice to have in GNOME?
	
	- do we want to have a set of strokes that are available by
        default in all GNOME applications? (I think this is highly
        desirable, I use a set of tools from Mentor that all use
        strokes, it is very convenient)
	  -if yes then applications should have a way to disable
           strokes so they can use the middle button for something
	   else 


The people that know gnomelibs/Gtk could then say what is the most
desirable and clean way to have strokes integrated, libstrokes is
small enough so it could be changed to fit different approaches. 
Do you aggree with this Mark? 


  > Or is that what you mean to begin with - just put libstroke in gnome-libs
  > for apps to use?

I don't think this is a good idea before we have a well defined API. 

--dan