[Pipet Devel] mouse buttons (was: excerpt from CHANGES)

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Brad Chapman wrote:
> 
> The thing that I worry about is us poor users of cheap mice lacking a
> middle button. If there a standard key/click combo for X-windows to
> get a button 2 click if you are missing button 2? (Hey, you have to
> remember--I'm used to the ol' Mac single button mice :-)

In X you can do button 2 (3 button mouse) emulation.  You can configure it so
that clicking button 1 and button 3 simultaneously, equals clicking button 2. 
The X configuration program that does this may be the same program that
configures your video card, but it may be a separate program.  I don't know
what FreeBSD uses.  Look into it; it's very common.

> The thing you really don't address is connecting loci together on a
> single workspace and how this would work in the new button scheme?
> Would this be a button 2 click as well? It seems to me that the major
> thing a user will be doing in Loci is moving loci around within a
> single workspace and connecting them.

That's a good point.  I didn't say anything about connector/dot movement.

Considering you wouldn't do an X DnD on just the connector, we can let button
1 handle this (connector/dot movement as it is now, being non-X DnD) IN
ADDITION TO button 2.  So, the user can move connectors around with either
button.

> To me, moving a loci to a new
> workspace, or even dragging it to a container is an "unusual" event,
> and this should be stuck with a more non-standard button press.

I was recently thinking about locus movement being 'quantized' or done in one
step (locus disappears from drag start location and reappears at drop
location) rather than continuous, for users with a slower system.  X DnD via
button 1 would do that for us, providing we can tell where on the canvas the
drop occurs.

Cheers.
Jeff
-- 
                      +----------------------------------+
                      |           J.W. Bizzaro           |
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                      | http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff/ |
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                      |        BIOINFORMATICS.ORG        |
                      |           The Open Lab           |
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                      |    http://bioinformatics.org/    |
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