[UI] More feel observations

[Bill Schwab]

Gary,

I did some more "real" programming today (working on a port of my
home-grown file backup system), and am starting to find that one of my
larger complaints (which I consider to be a sign of progress) is the
apparent lack of support for virtual keys - the home and end in
particular - in the unix VM.  My searching so far has not turned up
anything specifically useful, so I will probably submit a question to
Squeak-dev soon.

Vistary, at least on my hardware, is slow enough that I can easily type
faster than it can keep up.  Soft squeak is much harder to outrun on the
same hardware.  Note that I still cannot fully clobber it due to the
virtual key hassles.  Part of my input speed comes from
home/tab/past/space/etc/end, sometimes with shift depressed to make
selections. Some of this stuff is so engrained I don't even realize I do
it until it doesn't work.

One thing that is in our general area is mouse interaction.  It will be
difficult to catch this in the act, but there is pretty clearly
something to it.  Have some code in plain sight; now try to drag-select
it, quickly.  I get unpredictable results; sometimes it selects what I
want, usually it does not.  When I have had similar problems in other
systems, it suggests that the code is picking up current mouse
coordinates when it should be using event coordinates.

Re #mouseClickForKeyboardFocus, it appears to be selectively necessary. 
AFAICT, with other changes you have made, it is somewhat redundant.  The
message name browser is horribly broken without it.  A few times, I have
found that when adding methods, I get into a situation where the input
focus is undefined, or not where I want it anyway, making it necessary
to click in the code pane of the system browser.  The weird thing is
that in that situation, the cursor needs to be in the code pane for it
to get focus.  I have #mouseClickForKeyboardFocus set to true.

Sorry for the incomplete observations and guesswork, but it is hopefully
better to write down what I can remember.

Bill




Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
University of Florida
Department of Anesthesiology
PO Box 100254
Gainesville, FL 32610-0254

Email: bschwab at anest.ufl.edu
Tel: (352) 846-1285
FAX: (352) 392-7029