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Re: [usability] mouse-1 for performing actions?


From: Stefan Monnier
Subject: Re: [usability] mouse-1 for performing actions?
Date: Tue, 21 May 2002 16:05:19 -0400

>     Why does emacs use mouse-2 for activating hyperlinks, buttons etc?
> 
> Because these buffers are usually read-only, which means that the
> normal definition of mouse-2 (yank) is not applicable.
> 
> The normal definition of mouse-1 is perfectly meaningful in these
> buffers.  It seems like a bad idea to replace it with something
> incompatible and make the normal definition of mouse-1 unavailable.
> 
> Do you have a precise proposal that you think is ok?

I understand the above reason, but I must agrre that newbies find
it surprising that nothing happens when the click with mouse-1
(most of them rarely use mouse-2 since most applications only ever
use mouse-1 anyway or mouse-3 occasionally for a contextual menu).

We should try and come up with some way to have our cake and eat it too.
For this we need to figure out what do people use "mouse-1 click on
mouse-sensitive text" for.  In my case, it's mostly for cut&paste, which
means that drag-mouse-1 should definitely prevent the hyperlink activation.
Maybe I also sometimes us mouse-1 to place the cursor just before or
just after the hyperlink (the just-after case is OK because it doesn't
risk activating the hyperlink, but the just-before might require special
handling).


        Stefan




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