Re: Activate Scroll Key

[Tim Moore <tmoore tembel org>]

On 19 Aug 1998, Stephan Pfab wrote:

> 
> [about thinkpad third mouse buttom scrolling]
> 
> This is exactly the same as the 8way scrolling with middle button 
> drag.
> 
> I am still very much in favour of it.
> Remember that it has to be an additional feature and
> we can keep middle button click for paste (a X standard for a change).
> Keep the scrollbars, add the middlebutton-drag scrolling.

So mouse-2 click is paste and mouse-2 drag is scroll? These two functions
have absolutely nothing to do with each other! Putting them on the same
mouse button is a recipe for confusion, IMO.

Personally, I think that the standard X paste is confusing, because it's
highlight and paste -- there's no copy. Some people see this as a feature,
I know, but I don't like it because you can have selections in multiple
windows, and it's often not clear what is going to be pasted. It may work
in an environment composed mostly of xterms, but it really doesn't in a
GUI (e.g., KDE's clipboard functions are abysmal, IMO). 

So we could make mouse-2 click act as a regular GUI paste (i.e., the
two-step copy and paste, like in Motif apps) but I'd prefer to see the
button used for scrolling. For one, it's a much more common operation (at
least, it is for me). Also, there are two other (IMO, better) ways of
quickly pasting. One is drag & drop, which all text input controls should
accept if they don't already. It's just as direct as the mouse-2 click,
and only requires a little more coordination :-) The other is the "Paste"
command on the mouse-3 contextual pop-up menu that *should* be (but isn't
yet) attached to all text entry widgets. Windows 95/NT 4 and later have
these, and I dare say that it was a good idea.

Tim Moore