LookEnhancements enhancement

Tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Mon Aug 8 18:13:58 UTC 2005


Chris Muller <afunkyobject at yahoo.com> wrote:

[snip]


> Hi Tim, I don't understand how resizing would get activated
accidentally?  Does
> it happen when trying to scroll and you're not quite in the
scrollbar?  And is
> it expensive even with fastResizing turned on?
The resize cursor will appear (and seem to lock on for an annoying
amount of time) whenever you move the pointer over a suitable place -
or more precisely when a mouse move event is handled with the position
set right. Depending on how your machine's OS deals with events and how
well the VM passes them up and how well specific image you are running
is feeling it can appear to lock up quite firmly for a second or more.
I've seen this on all my macs, on my (ex)windows laptop and my RISC OS
box. It's worst on ROS because it's relatively slow but it can be very
annoying even on a 1.5GHz pBook.


> 
> The reason I ask is, resizing is something I wish were easier to do,
not
> harder.  You have to position the mouse precisely within a 2 or 3
pixel range,
> wait for the event-loop to convert the mouse-pointer so you know its
in the
> right spot (because the visual edge isn't the actual resize region),
and then
> finally click and drag it.  Three steps just to get more visibility.

I think it's that waiting for the event loop bit that causes a lot of
the problem. I haven't looked at the code in donkey's years but I seem
to remember that it hasn't really been converted to sensible event code
from ugly looping code yet. Maybe that would fix the problem.

As a positive suggestion I will throw out the idea of NOT having the
normal motion of the cursor activate the resize but using some meta-key
action (just as an example, ctl-mousebutton) to
a) activate the resize areas
b) EXPAND them to make the easier to hit just while the meta-action is
alive.



tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at rowledge.org, http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- Used to have a handle on life, but it broke.



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