[GNC-dev] Mouse usage in Gnucash

[David Carlson]

Are there examples in other major applications  to compare to?


David Carlson

On Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 11:33 PM D via gnucash-devel <
gnucash-devel at gnucash.org> wrote:

>
>
> On October 12, 2019, at 3:45 AM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
>
> >
> >> On Oct 10, 2019, at 10:26 PM, David Cousens <davidcousens at bigpond.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> Do we by any chance have some sort of standard description of mouse
> usage in
> >> GNuCash on the various OS.
> >>
> >> I am updating documentation. Docbooks has tags for description of mouse
> >> operations.  With configurable mouses for LH or RH operation terms like
> Left
> >> Click and Right Click start to become ambiguous. DocBooks has tags for
> >> <mousebutton>. In a review of some recent changes Frank suggested using
> >> Button1, Button2 and Button 3 rather than Left, Middle and Right to
> avoid
> >> the LH/RH mouse conundrum.  I haven't been able to find anything in the
> >> documentation re input devices but I could have missed it
> >>
> >> Two of my mice have 6 buttons and two scroll wheels (basic config is a 2
> >> button + central scroll/button) and  another only has 2 buttons and a
> single
> >> scroll wheel/button. Linux Mint can configure that for LH operation,
> >> emulation of a centre button by pressing both buttons together,
> scrolling
> >> reversal and double click timeout and I presume most OSs will have
> something
> >> similar. Then we go to Macs and we have single buttons and magic mice to
> >> contend with.  Then there are tablets and touchpads and gestures.  GTK3
> >> seems to support a wide range
> >> https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/chap-input-handling.html and
> does
> >> interpret the scroll wheel appropriately on my mice but the wheel button
> >> inserts "another" each time it is pressed while editing a transaction
> in a
> >> register - not too useful.
> >>
> >> It is clearly far too onerous to describe all possible mice/input
> >> variations.
> >>
> >> My own preference would to perhaps settle on a fairly common 2 button RH
> >> basic mouse and keyboard configuration and describe operations in terms
> of
> >> that. Perhaps then offer in a wiki section some translations from this
> >> configuration to other configurations like track pads that could be
> >> populated by users. I think Left (Centre) Right  for a RH mouse is
> likely to
> >> be far less confusing to translate than a "Button1 Button2, Button3
> where
> >> it is totally ambiguous whether the mouse is LH RH or upside down.
> >>
> >David,
> >The middle-button behavior on Linux is an X-Windows thing: The right
> button begins a selection, the left button completes the selection, and the
> middle button pastes the selection. I don't know if Wayland has that
> behavior as well. Gtk has a GdkSelection class to try to provide it on
> other Ones but it was implemented only partly on Windows and not at all on
> MacOS. It's been deprecated for some time.
> >If you don't like "left click" or "click button 1", how about "primary
> click" and "secondary click"? You could even say "primary click/tap" to
> include the touchpad users.
> >I don't think that it's particularly useful for our documentation to try
> to teach users the basics of using their computers, and explaining
> everything at that level quickly gets tiresome for the majority of users
> who know how to click a button, select some text, or open a context menu.
> >Regards,
> >John Ralls
> >_______________________________________________
> >gnucash-devel mailing list
> >gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
> >https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
>
> +1 to John's comments.
>
> I think it best to focus on the task, rather than the specific mechanics.
>
> David T.
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