Re: Activate Scroll Key

[Tim Moore <tmoore tembel org>]

On Wed, 19 Aug 1998, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

> >  I strongly disagree with taking away the middle-button-paste function. I
> >  would hate you forever, needing it quite often in my daily work.
> 
> A lot of X users are used to pasting text using mouse button 2, so we
> cannot remove that functionality.
> 
> Applications like the GIMP where scrolling makes sense but inserting
> text does not (i.e. the GIMP's image windows) can use mouse button 2
> for scrolling.

Well, it seems funny to me to restrict mouse-pasting to text. Why can't it
paste graphics too? And for that matter, why doesn't it make sense to
insert text into GIMP? Graphics can contain text, right? GIMP has a text
tool, right? Why can't mouse-paste be just like clicking with the text
tool, but with the dialog already partially filled out?

> 
> If it does make sense to insert text *and* scroll, we could use mouse
> button 2 for inserting text and shift+mouse button 2 to scroll.  This
> is analogous to the way you use shift plus the mouse buttons when you
> run a terminal program that supports the mouse inside an Xterm.

Hmm. I still don't like that. It still involves putting two unrelated
functions on the same button. Also, it won't be consistant -- or even
obvious -- whether scrolling is shifted or not in a given program.
Finally, shift+drag is an akward enough gesture to not really be a useful
shortcut.

I'm still in favor of reassignable logical buttons. That way, a person
with a four button mouse can have *both* paste *and* scroll in every
program without having to resort to keyboard modifiers.

Tim