Re: question about RMB

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Mon, Oct 16, 2000 at 08:59:43AM +1300 or thereabouts, Michael Koziarski wrote:
> > By specifying what button to use, you're going 
> > to maybe confuse a few users who do use a system like that.  Comments?
> 
> I work on the helpdesk and consequently deal with 'southpaws' all the
> time. I've never heard any complaints from them.

You missed several threads on here last year and several discussions
on IRC then. I -hate- "left-click, right-click, middle-click". I don't
see what's so hard about "button 1, button 2", etc. 

And I am in a minority here. But..

I am left-handed, use my mouse in my left hand, and remap the buttons
because I found that using one of my less strong fingers all the
time was hurting my fingers and wrists, and I was scared of doing
myself some damage. 

The laptop has a touchpad. Alan has a laptop with one of these stylus
things, where you actually tap it in different ways to generate 
different clicks. When my mouse drowned in coffee and I needed to
save some work before control-alt-backspace (and may I point out that
GNOME desperately need more keyboard bindings? Again? :)), I used
the numberpad (the XKB extensions let you do all the mouse movement
and clicking with the keyboard: cumbersome but useful!) to do the
moving and clicking. (S'dead cool, this numberpad stuff.) 

None of those are straightforward "one mouse, three buttons". 
It is easier to translate all of those to and from button 1, 2, 3
than it is to translate them to "left, middle, right" and then 
translate them to "that's usually 1, 2, 3". 

One of the reasons I dislike ee as an image viewer is that it
imitates xv and says "right-click for the menu" on the splash screen.
Even if you have a leftie mouse. The authors of each program just
didn't consider that it might not be the right button for some people. 
Ditto for the enlightenment help balloons. When you don't know a window 
manager, that is very confusing: is it aware your mouse is 'backwards'? 
Or do you have to convert in your head? When I started using Gnome, I
was dead impressed with how much it carried over between applications,
and it was by no means obvious that actually, e had no idea about the
mouse buttons. I really thought it might have found out and altered
the help balloons for me. You can imagine the results :) It was one
reason I started looking for a different window manager. (You can't 
change this nomenclature in these apps either. Well, short of 
recompiling after swapping all the lefts and rights round in the help 
ballooons.)

Window Maker's help stuff tells you about button 1, button 2
nomenclature. It then uses left and right (I think, long time since
I read it!) but at least it tells you. wmakerconf uses "Button
one (left button)". sawfish seems to use button 1, 2, 3 in its
help, and it's one reason I keep thinking "must learn sawfish".

> Similar arguments could be raised for single vs double clicking, etc.
> 
> I think the same approach we use for themes should suffice. Only
> document the defaults.  If they changed it they know they did and can
> adapt the documentation accordingly.
> 
> Well, that's my 2c.

This was the consensus (except for me, muttering in a corner :)) last
time.

As I say, for new users impressed with how much GNOME seems to carry
over between things, and who don't know the difference between X, a
window manager and the various apps running, it's not a given. If
they are sufficiently impressed with GNOME, as I was, they will wonder
"well, I changed the buttons in the control center, so will everything
else pick that up too, and alter its wording of left/right click?".

Or maybe I was just stupid :) 

I actually considered the chances of persuading everyone in the GDP to 
use entities for mouse buttons and then when you started the help for
something, the magic docbook to HTML converter (which was still more
in discussion than it was in existence) would check to see whether
the mouse was left or right and switch all the entities for you.

But then I'm the one who wanted all the screenshots to show up with
whatever window manager you were currently using, too, and everyone
looked pained at that one. :) 

Telsa