Re: Debian menus policy
Erik Steffl wrote:
> "Marcelo E. Magallon" wrote:
>
> > The point you are missing is that Window Maker doesn't like overloading
> > actions, and the authors are particularly sensitive to overloading
> > mouse actions. What you are proposing is "if the user left-clicks, A
> > happens; if the user left-clicks+holds-the-button-down-for-more-than-N-
> > seconds-and-moves-it-M-pixels-in-that-timeframe B happens". If you
>
> don't be ridiculous. click and drag having different functionality is
> fairly common, even in ms win (the newbie system, generally considered
> non-confusing enough) [there is some discussion about how much different
> though]
Yes, but it depends how mouse events are related to UI actions. This can
be made clearer by talking, instead of "clicks" and "drags", about mouse
events: button down, button up, move.
There are a couple of different ways that popup menus can be triggered
by the mouse. If the menu is triggered by a button up event, then you
can meaningfully distinguish between drags and "clicks", because the
button went down and then back up without any significant motion of the
mouse in between (usually a pixel or two of motion is ignored).
But if a menu pops up when the button goes down (which sounds like what
Window Maker does, from Marcelo's description), you CANNOT associate a
"click without motion" with some other event, because by the time you
know you have a "click without motion", the menu has already popped up.
It would be really hideous for a menu to briefly flash onto the screen,
and then some other action occurs because the user hadn't moved the
mouse.
Marcelo's preference seems to be for the menu popping up on button down,
because then he can pop up the menu and select from it with a single
click-and-drag action (button down brings the menu up, he drags to the
item he wants, then button up selects that item).
You will notice, by contrast, that MS Windows' right-click menu on the
desktop only appears on button up, precisely because they want to let
a right click and a right drag mean subtly different things.
In other contexts, Windows menus often pop up on button down, such as
when you click on an application's menu or the "start" button.
Unfortunately, I'm sitting at a Windows XP machine at my office at the
moment, without an X-enabled *n*x machine in sight, so I can't verify at
the moment exactly how the menus work in GTK apps, or in any of the
window managers I have installed at home.
Craig
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