GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 729151
Overview app list doesn't use 'hold-and-drag' convention, so you often end up dragging when you want to scroll
Last modified: 2021-07-05 14:19:16 UTC
Another touch issue, from testing on my Bay Trail tablet. In Nautilus, GNOME 3 seems to observe what I think of as the 'touch, hold and drag' convention - to drag something, you have to 'hold' it for a brief time first, to indicate selection. The Shell app list in the overview doesn't behave this way, which makes scrolling it quite hard. You have to carefully aim between the rows of icons with your finger when initiating the drag scroll action in order to actually drag the list. If you touch an icon when initiating your drag - even though you start dragging as soon as you touch the screen, with no action to suggest to GNOME that you actually wanted to "grab" the icon - GNOME treats it as a drag-n-drop action. Oh, when I say 'app list', to be clear, I mean the thing you get when you open the overview and click on the bottom icon in the Dash - the scrollable list of applications that can be launched.
(In reply to comment #0) > In Nautilus, GNOME 3 seems to observe what I think of as the 'touch, hold and > drag' convention - to drag something, you have to 'hold' it for a brief time > first, to indicate selection. How does it handle context menus? Because we use click to activate immediately, click+drag to start a drag and long-click to open the context menu - leaving swipe scrolling in the poor state it is. > Oh, when I say 'app list', to be clear, I mean [...] the scrollable list of > applications that can be launched. It was perfectly clear what you meant, but for reference: we call it either 'app picker' or 'app view'.
"It was perfectly clear what you meant, but for reference: we call it either 'app picker' or 'app view'." Roger, thanks. "How does it handle context menus?" Poorly. :P There may be a way to access one, but if there is, I haven't figured it out yet. I would've expected all this kind of stuff would have been discussed and standardized across the desktop, and probably abstracted out above the app layer, but it seems like that isn't the case, from my testing so far?
FWIW, I think mobile platforms tend to combine the 'context menu' and 'drag' actions by having a long press sort of act as a trigger for both - after long pressing an item its context menu (or equivalent) pops up (and doesn't go away again until explicitly dismissed), and if appropriate, it can also be dragged.
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