GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 91584
Improvement of single click mode
Last modified: 2006-12-26 18:29:51 UTC
I currently use the single click mode in nautilus because I find it more consistent with the gnome desktop (particularly with the panel launchers). But there are some problems with this mode, especially when you only want to select something. I think this mode would be more usable if it enables the following things: - single left click on an icon picture launches/opens item. - single left click on the icon label only selects item. - double left click on icon label enters in rename mode. - and give a feedback to the user with to different mouse cursors : the cursor of galeon (when the mouse is over a link) when the mouse pointer is over the icon picture, and the cursor of eog (when the mouse is over the picture area) when the mouse pointer is over an icon label, for example. Advantages: - selection more easy in both icon and list view. - consistency bewteen icon and list view. - direct acces to the rename mode without context menu. Drawback: - in list view, with these features, the area for opening/launching an item is restricted to the icon picture area, which is quite small. Emmanuel.
Personal opinion: I also am a single click user. And while i understand some of your frustrations, I think there are some issues with your proposal. First and foremost, the behavior you propose would contradict with the behavior of toolbar icons+text, where users can click anywhere either on the text or on the icon to launch a tool. I personally think consistant behavior is important across desktop elements. Also there are fitts law considerations. In the icon view this wouldn't be as much of an issue since icons tend to be large for most users, however this behavior would make the list view very hard to use as the largest target for mouse clicking is typically the file name (icons tend to be smaller in the list view). All that said, using different mouse cursors is a really good idea imho. Anyway thats my opinion. CCing usability maint for theirs.
>Personal opinion: >I also am a single click user. And while i understand some of your >frustrations, I think there are some issues with your proposal. First >and foremost, the behavior you propose would contradict with the >behavior of toolbar icons+text, where users can click anywhere either >on the text or on the icon to launch a tool. I personally think >consistant behavior is important across desktop elements. Yes, but if it breaks consistancy, which I agree is bad, user feedback is different (in the toolbar, icons/text are included in a button when the mouse is over them, and icons/text on the desktop will be only highlited with different mouse cursors). >Also there are fitts law considerations. In the icon view this >wouldn't be as much of an issue since icons tend to be large for most >users, however this behavior would make the list view very hard to >use as the largest target for mouse clicking is typically the file >name (icons tend to be smaller in the list view). In the list view, there is icon, file name and file properties. We can have two big mouse targets : icon+file properties and file name. With the different mouse cursors, I think the learning time for this new behaviour would be short. >Anyway thats my opinion. Thanks for your comments. Emmanuel.
Well I've always hated single-click mode so I'm not going to get involved in this too much :) But I agree that we should use the hyperlink cursor whenever the mouse is over any icon that will be activated by a single click.
I'm going to mark this a dupe of bug 97486, it covers the mouse cursor issue, I'm fairly against click to rename, it just doesn't work very well, and having talked to calum in the past about this I believe he agrees. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 97486 ***
Mass reassigning bugs with 2.2.0 milestone to 2.2.x milestone Grep for "Mass reassigning" to filter out this bug spam.