[Nautilus-list] Feature request: mouse gestures in Nautilus

[Simos Xenitellis <simos pc96 ma rhbnc ac uk>]

Dear All,
	This is an initial e-mail about mouse gestures,
or in the general view, a way to associate input device events
to specific actions.
	For example, if someone is browsing using Mozilla,
she may use the "secondary" mouse button to click and drag
an imaginative line (or "stroke") to the left in order to
go to the previous page in the history.
	Programmatically, this associates the sequence of
events:
	. secondary button clicked (get position)
	. mouse move (record positions while moving!)
	. secondary button released (get position)

to the History Back action (Alt-Left arrow, for example).

Using the position values, an application can determing the
direction of the mouse.

	This functionality is quite common in PDAs
and strangely enough with the CAD products.

	It has become very popular from a couple of postings
in Slashdot, one discussing the new version of the Opera
WWW browser that has "mouse gesture" support
and another that was mentioning  a company called "Sensiva"
(www.sensiva.com) that has Win/Mac and Linux application software
to enable gesture support.

	Reading the comments on mouse gestures, there were two
groups a people, people either adoring them and other that disliked
them. The negative group results could be due to user-interface
unfimiliarity.

	Thus, one could use the Sensiva Linux client and configure
it to be used in Linux X applications.

	Apart from the Sensiva client, there are several
open-source initiatives such as:

	http://wayv.sourceforge.net 	(Mike Bennett)
	http://http://www.etla.net/libstroke/ (Mark Willey)
	http://www.handhelds.org/projects/xscribble.html (HandHelds.org)

This "mouse gesture" functionality looks to be a required feature in
embedded versions of GNOME and a highly desired one in GNOME in general.

	There are decisions to be made on where the mouse gesture support
should be put.
	a. How much should be abstracted? Should it be only for pointing
	devices like mice? Or for both mice and pens?
	b. Should there be an X extension or is there one that can
	accomodation the mouse gesture functionality?
	c. Should the mouse gesture core be put in the X server, the
	graphical environment (like GNOME or KDE), the Window manager
	(like sawfish) or as an even higher level applications like
	in the Sensiva solution?

	Since Nautilus is enhancing the user-experience quite
dramatically, there might be a need to add such support of mouse gestures
in a clean way. Mouse gestures constitute a big enhancement to the UI.

	Mouse gestures do not appear to be present in either Windows
or the Mac and additionally appear not to be patented.

I would be happy if I manage to stir a conversation on mouse gestures.

Thanks,
simos