"....well, don't do that, then!" - is this really sensible?

Alan Mackenzie acm at muc.de
Tue May 4 21:59:18 CEST 2021


Hello, xfce!

I'm on xfce-panel 4.16.2.

I was messing around with the xfce4 settings half an hour ago, trying to
find a way to fix what to me is "breakage" with the mouse:

(i) Clicking in the scroll bar no longer does Page Up/Down - it scrolls
the window to the position of the mouse click.  This, to me, is a Bad
Thing.

(ii) When a window is too big, you used to be able to click the mouse on
the window's edge and drag it to a sensible size.  This appears not to
work any more - instead you've got to click the mouse _outside_ the
window's edge, which is impossible if the window's position it tight up
against the desktop edge.  This is also a Bad Thing, IMNSHO.

..  Anyhow....

In my messing around, I clicked on <Settings>/<Mouse and Touchpad>, where
I had the misfortune to click on an On/Off button.  BIg Mistake!  This
disabled the mouse entirely.  More than that, it disabled the XFCE4
session entirely - maybe there are keyboard commands to switch on the
mouse again, but I don't know them.

Worse than that, after I terminated XFCE4 with <alt>F4 and restarted it,
it restarted with the mouse disabled.  HEEEEEE......EEELLLPP!

Also, the help facilities are unhelpful, since all they do is offer to
display the online manuals.  Web browsers require a mouse to work.

To "solve" this, I had to go back to a tty, use

    $ find ... | xargs grep -lrt

to find files recently changed and then guess which one to edit.  I tried

    $ vim .config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/pointers.xml

, where I guessed that changing a "0" to a "1" would bring back my mouse.
Luckily it did.

I think it's a bug that there is no "this could disable your XFCE4; are
you sure you want to do this?" dialog box attached to this On/Off button.
It is not clearly labelled, and it is far too easy to click on, and far
too difficult to recover from after having clicked it.  Would you please
consider amending this facility.

Any help with my original two mouse problems would also be appreciated.

Thanks!

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).


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