Re: scroll bar and drop down list usability

[Ken Fox <kfox vulpes com>]

thristian@atdot.org wrote:
> But, but, but..! As Ben FrantzDale wrote up there, a middle *click*
> can be distinguished from a middle *drag*.

It's possible, but I'm not sure how well it would work. It kind of
reminds me of the wheel mouse problems just discussed where Microsoft
thought the wheel could be *both* a button and a wheel... ;)

IMHO scrolling should be safe -- people should be confident that
they can press the middle button and drag away without any consequences.
If paste is bound to a degenerate drag, i.e. zero or one pixel
distance drag, then it may occasionally surprise them. Also, I can
imagine some application developers interpreting the "cancel paste"
operation as being "deactivate selection", which would be really
annoying.

Anyways, buttons are precious, so it's worth trying to see whether
overloading middle mouse is useful. (It might be a useful configuration
option too -- xterm compatibility or something.)

> Meanwhile, a question for all those who want to gain empirical HCI
> data: is it better for middle-click-paste to insert text at the mouse
> position or where the text cursor is?

text cursor.

- Ken