[Xfce-bugs] [Bug 796] scroll wheel desktop changing behaviour should be reversable

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------- Additional Comments From jmoiron at stevens.edu  2005-11-03 19:04 UTC -------
(In reply to comment #0)
> The scroll wheel desktop flipping direction (up=left) is counterintuitive to a
> large group of people, who consider UP an INCREMENT. as desktop 1 is a lower
> number than 2, they would prefer that an UP scroll wheel event should result in
> the desktop being changed to the RIGHT.

The intuition behind down -> right and up -> left is mostly based on reading and
on vertical scroll wheel behavior.  In the vertical domain, scroll up and scroll
down of course go up and down, but since we read from top to bottom, it can also
be viewed as "go forward" and "go backwards" (in the current document).  There
has always been a set of (mostly novice) people who have found scroll wheel
behavior to be odd because the document itself scrolls upwards as you scroll
downwards, but once they understand that your document window is more of a
viewport than the document itself, they start to grasp it.

When extended to the horizontal scroll bar, the default GTK behavior (for my
locale at least; i'm not sure if its locale dependent) is to scroll to the right
on scroll down and to the left on scroll up.  For readers of languages that flow
left to right, this does *not* break the spatial paradigm described above, and,
 indeed, if you lined up the desktops horizontally (left to right) starting from
1 and vertically starting from 1, the vertical scrolling paradigm does not
change.  For your example, it does, or: your example would mean scrolling down
on vertically arranged desktops to move spatially upwards (following numbers in
decreasing order upwards), which is counterintuitive to normal scroll wheel
behavior.

Most people think spatially with the desktop metaphor (since it *is* spatial),
and not numerically, but since other wm's handle desktop scrolling in the way
you suggest I don't think that allowing this to be configurable is too damaging.

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