Re: setting gdk display

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

>It's a UI mess waiting to happen as well.  control-alt-cokebottle all over aga
>in.
>
>http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/cokebottle.html
>
>except now control is on 'e' and alt is on 'p' if you're using left mouse,
>but control is on 'q' and meta is on 'b' if you're using right mouse, and if
>you're using the trackball and button-7 (Yes, a Microsoft Optical Trackball
>has 7) all bets are off...
>
>(I know Paul has half a clue regarding UI design - I'm mentioning this as a wa
>rning
>to the 2,493 people on this list who think they have a clue and don't....)

i appreciate valdis' faith :)

just keep in mind that my main user base is used to dealing with user
interfaces containing hundreds (occasionally thousands) of physical
buttons. the notion that controlling a device should be done using 3-5
buttons plus 3-5 modifiers plus a bunch of popup menus is totally
alien and uncomfortable to them.

this is not a crowd with deep experience of the kinds of GUIs
regularly built with GTK, or with win32 or Qt or anything else for
that matter. in addition, as i've mentioned before, the GUI model that
GTK represents (along with just about every other toolkit i've ever
seen) tends to support programs in which keyboard or mouse driven
input from the user is the central source of data for the application
(e.g. word processing, graphics, email, spreadsheets, calculators,
etc, etc). 

my work is in areas where data from the user arrives as digital audio
data or MIDI, and the UI is not there to *input* information but to
*control* and edit it (indirectly) generally in real time. this tends
to lead us towards significantly different UI paradigms.

finally, i'd also note the similarity in what we're thinking of doing
with ardour to the debate between "modeless" and "modeful" text
editors. if you restrict yourself to the use of mouse buttons and a
few modifiers, you're forcing different mouse modes ("tools") on just
about all but the simplest application. by contrast, use the keyboard
as the primary initiator of actions, and you can probably avoid mouse
modes ("tools"), most of the time. good? bad? vi? emacs?

--p