Mouse shorcuts (and others)

Brian J. Tarricone bjt23 at cornell.edu
Tue May 11 16:28:14 CEST 2004


i'm going to make a simple point here, and i'm going to try to do so 
without my usual rambling.

xfce is not for everyone.  while i don't wish to drive people away from 
xfce, if it isn't working for you, and your feature requests are shot 
down, then perhaps you should look elsewhere.  both gnome and kde aim to 
be super-accessible for people with all kinds of disabilities.  while 
xfce will make a reasonable effort to be accesible as well, you should 
not expect special/extra features solely in the name of accessibility, 
unless it addresses some important usability problem.  i personally (and 
i think the other devs as well) do not believe that the lack of 
configurable mouse shortcuts is a big hit to usability.

keyboard shortcuts are a different matter.  the WMs keyboard shortcuts 
are already reasonably configurable.  i believe JF is working on a GUI 
editor for kdb shortcuts.

as much as i dislike the aforementioned car analogy, in one way it was 
somewhat correct.  think about the target audience of the ferrari: a 
ferrari isn't for everyone, and perhaps neither is xfce.  i don't see 
how xfce can cater to 'everyone' and remain lightweight and avoid 
featuritis and bloat.

	-brian


On Tue, 11 May 2004, Xavier Otazu wrote:

> 
> 	Hi everybody:
> 
> purslow at sympatico.ca wrote:
> > 
> > Xavier raised an important issue in a rational manner & deserves respect.
> > moreover reading between his lines, he suffers some kind of disability
> > which makes it less easy for him to use the default interface.
> > 
> 
> 	I have to clarify a point. I am not who has physical disabilities, but 
> one of my job colleagues.
> 
> 	In fact, some time ago I worked with a person with visual problems, and 
> then I realize that computer environtments have to be configurable for 
> this persons. Actually I have again a job colleague with serious 
> physical problems. She is in a wheelchair and has some hands 
> coordination problems, and she is a really great programmer. When I work 
> with her, she is really suffering when pointing to small window zones 
> (iconify buttons, and similar), and she likes to perform this with 
> combination of mouse clikcs and 'Ctrl' key or other keyboard shorcuts.
> 
> 	Fortunately, I have no such physical problems, but I am really aware 
> about it.
> 
> 	Appart from the accesibility issue, I thin this feature would be great 
> for everybody (I am using it for many years). I am not telling to 
> invalidate default behaviour, but simply to allow users to enhance this 
> features.
> 
> 
> 
> 	I also would like to comment on other development proposals. One is the 
> possibility to define window focus 'strictly under mouse'. Some times I 
> have to point mouse out of window to return again on window to get focus 
> (or to click onto window) to get focus. It is specially annoying when 
> using keyboard shorcuts to lower or iconify a window. If I want to work 
> on the new visible window, I have to click on it, which is not as faster 
> as simply use the keyboard shorcut.
> 	
> 	I also would like to propose the possibility to define workspaces in a 
> 2D way. That is, actually workspaces are numbered linearly, and to go 
> from workspace 1 to 3 you always have to go through workspace 2. In a 
> 2-D workspace ordering, changing to the right workspace would be going 
> to the workspace 2; changing to the lower workspace would be going to 
> the workspace 3. When working with more than 4 workspaces, the linear 1D 
> workspace arrangement is a bit annoying.
> 
> 	I have seen that with the visual workspace plugin they can be 
> 'visually' arranged in a 2D way, but you cannot navigate in this way.
> 
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> Xavier
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Xfce4-dev mailing list
> Xfce4-dev at xfce.org
> http://lunar-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/xfce4-dev
> 
> 




More information about the Xfce4-dev mailing list