Re: [Usability] Using mousewheel for shading/unshading windows?

[Sam Stephenson <sstephenson gmail com>]

On Sun, 1 Aug 2004 16:40:11 -0500, Jonathan Rockway <jrockway gmail com> wrote:
> The same goes for scroll-wheel on the desktop and in the pager (like
> XFCE4).  I'm used to it changing virtual desktops, but that could be
> very confusing for other people.  (I have in fact witnessed this
> confusion; I made some old iMacs XFCE4 workstations and just about
> everyone that used them switched desktops and got very confused.  So
> in terms of usability, this is a bad idea.  But it would be nice if
> the Power Users could enable it.)

Using the scroll wheel on the desktop is a really bad idea. If you
want to be able to cycle through every desktop, you need a common area
on each desktop that isn't covered with a window -- otherwise you'll
eventually hit a window and it'll grab the scroll wheel event. I've
never found it to be usable, at least with the way I arrange my
windows and desktops, in any of the WMs that implement it.

However, I think having the scroll wheel switch desktops in the pager
is an excellent idea, especially if you place your pager in a corner
of the screen (Fitts' Law).  There's a patch by Mikael Brockman to do
just this (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=130308) but
somehow it's slipped through both the 2.6 and the 2.8 feature freezes.

> Jonathan Rockway <jrockway gmail com>

Sam