[squeak-dev] Annoying list morph selection/menu click bug

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Mon Jan 6 22:48:15 UTC 2020



> On 2020-01-06, at 2:55 AM, Marcel Taeumel <marcel.taeumel at hpi.de> wrote:
> 
> Hmm... the actual reason for ENABLING that preference by default is that it saves you a click on many occasions. Just yellow-click a selector, for example, and pick an option. No need for an additional red click.
> 
> Even better: YELLOW mouse down, mouse move to the desired menu item, YELLOW mouse up and you are done with a single click. :-D

I see the potential advantages, really, I do. And with the latest 19315 updates and the newest VM the really, really, annoying jumping around of the list that was (almost certainly) caused by the scrollwheel event insanity has gone and thus this option is tolerable, sort of.

The problem with it as an idea is that with some item selected in the list you have to go back precisely to that item when you want to use the menu, or you get to use the menu on a newly (and probably surprisingly) selected item. And of course you lose the prior selection as a side-effect. In a long list that can be very irritating! The way we use menus in the browser for example makes that extremely distracting - you might be looking at SHTextStylerST80>>#createTextAttributesForPixelHeight: and press <menu> in the method list  expecting copy the reference for the method (to paste here...) and you find you actually got the reference for SHTextStylerST80>>#environment:. Or perhaps you wanted the 'senders of...' and get a strange looking list of options not at all related to #createTextAttributesForPixelHeight:

So yes, it potentially saves you a <select> but costs you the extra time and concentration to <menu> in exactly the right place instead of just anywhere in the list.

The way Mac OS seems to handle that is a bit convoluted but probably a bit less annoying in the end; you have a selection, move the pointer to some other item and press<menu> - the 'new' item is border-selected rather than solid-selected, and the menu item clicked on applies to that new selection BUT the old selection is returned to. It sounds really weird but it works... ok. ish.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
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