Re: Rethinking the design of xwidgets

[Akira Kyle]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 12:44 PM, Qiantan Hong <qhong@mit.edu> 
wrote:

> I agree that displaying a live updating rectangle/slider 
> following the mouse is near impossible.
>
> For selecting region, supporting two mouse click should be 
> totally doable. For selecting
> data series, read-from-minibuffer together with user’s favorite 
> completion/fuzzy search package
> should be suffice. Those are discrete event. But do we really 
> need continuous event that
> much? E.g. what useful information is exchanged between 
> computer/user when drawing a 
> rectangle following user’s mouse? It seems to me that only the 
> starting and ending position
> matters. More here 
> http://cat-v.mit.edu/2019-10-15-mouse-considered-harmful.html

I totally agree that "Mouse considered harmful for most daily 
usage" however selecting a region is definitely one in which 
having the region highlighted as one drags the mouse is 
"continuous 2D data". This actually drives me crazy when I use 
pdf-view-set-slice-from-bounding-box in pdf-tools. As I'm always 
on my laptop, getting the bounding box of the pdf content as tight 
as possible is important but its hard to judge the full extent of 
the rectangle I made with just two points.

> However, if everyone decides that every event mouse spits out 
> matters (which is a lot),
> then it is the case that image display won’t work good enough.

Wouldn't it be fun to be able to free form draw inside emacs? :)