Re: [Nautilus-list] selection

[John Sullivan <sullivan eazel com>]

Hi Mathieu,

What you are describing is very much on purpose. The third state, what you
are calling "highlighted", is what is often called "prelighting". The idea
is that active areas of the screen light up in a subtle way as you move the
cursor over them, to indicate that they are active and that clicking will do
something. It is a lightweight, transient sort of feedback. Real selection,
such as you get with dragging a box around icons (or shift-clicking them, or
just clicking them when the double-click-to-activate preference is set), is
a more stable state that does not change based on mouse location.

Many widgets behave this same way. For instance, GtkCheckButtons light up
when you're moving over them, but are not "selected" until you click.

John

on 5/27/00 6:47 AM, Mathieu Lacage at lacage stills enst fr wrote:

> hi,
> 
> I should have written this mail a long time ago but
> could not find time to do so: last time I compiled nautilus,
> (ages ago: 1 month or so) I noticed something with selection
> which I find not very intuitive.
> 
> There are 2 ways to click/navigate: double-click and single-click.
> 
> The single-click mode proceeds as folows:
> when you go over an icon, it gets highlighted to show
> that it is selected. You can then right-click to get the context
> menu. 
> The problem with this is that selection was usually represented
> by some kind of reverse video and, for exemple, after you have
> right cliked over an icon, the icon gets effectively the reverse
> video look. I find this rather disturbing because it seems to say:
> there are 3 levels of selection: non-selected, highlighted and
> selected. 
> 
> My feeling is that when you get over an icon, the icon should
> be reversed-video instead of being highlighted.
> Or, to be more precise, being over an icon should give the same
> graphic result as selecting icons with a rectangular lasso.
> 
> I don't know if what I describe is still the case but I consider
> this as a bug.