Re: proposal: handle middle/right clicks on arrows of scrollbarsdifferently

[Paul Barton-Davis <pbd op net>]

>2) Even more inteligent:
>   Middle click on the arrow moves the slider right to that edge of
>   scrollbar, right click - right to oposite edge. This is IMO very handy
>   when your pointer is over the left arrow of horizontal scrollbar and you
>   have to scroll to 90% of scrollbar: you press right button (slider goes to 
>   the 100% limit), and then press left mouse button several times (it's
>   over left arrow, remember?) to move slider to 90%.
>   May be the meaning of right and middle presses should be reversed since
>   middle button is not present on a lot of mouses.

this raises a particular annoyance of mine. the current GTK widget set
makes almost no use of multiple mouse buttons for anything. one of the
most annoying cases of this is the SpinButton. it is incredibly
annoying to have to move the mouse in order to change direction when
spinning. its much nicer to have each button (or one button, if
desired) that can drive the spin in each direction.

i tried to fix this in the gtk code, but it was too much work to try
to get it right, and i didn't feel that the changes i made would be
accepted. so i did it more abstractly in Gtk--:

	  AutoSpin: not a visible widget, but a controller for
	            an adjustment. You can call "start_spinning(up_or_down)"
		    and "stop_spinning()", presumably on
		    receipt of a button_press/release event in
		    some visible widget.

With an AutoSpin object, you can use any other widget you want to
control an adjustment with "spin-like" behaviour. i typically use
single buttons (eventboxes) where mouse 1 starts spinning down, mouse
3 starts spinning up, and mouse 2 returns to the median adjustment
value.

if there is enough interest, i could possibly cook up a GTK+ version
of AutoSpin.

--p