GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 140710
window resize mouse/key binding is inconvenient
Last modified: 2006-04-10 00:02:51 UTC
Currently, to resize a window with the mouse without having to use the handles, you have to use whatever your mouse modifier is (ALT, by default, I think) + middle click. This is annoying. Middle click might be emulated by pressing both left and right buttons, or usually comes when pressing the scroll wheel. In such cases, having to press the modifier in addition to the middle button is inconvenient, while WindowMaker and kwin both use the ALT + right click key/mouse stroke in order to do the same. My suggestion would be to either have configuration items (or at least gconf keys) for changing the mouse buttons bindings or just to change the hardcoded current value to a more convenient one.
Hmmm... normally I don't like changing behavior I'm used to, but this one could potentially be the right thing to do: Pros: * I believe resizing is a considerably more common task than trying to bring up the current Alt-RightClick menu, and that the right mouse button is easier to use than the middle mouse button (both because the middle button may be a wheel, and because it might be an emulated button). Thus, it makes sense to me usability wise to pair Alt-RightClick with resize. * Makes Metacity and other window managers feel more interoperable. Cons: * Some people have to relearn some habits. Am I missing anything, Rob and Havoc?
Feels a little funny to me for right click to do other than open a menu... plus we'd get a storm of confused people if we changed it. But really it's mostly an arbitrary toss-up.
> plus we'd get a storm of confused people if we changed it. Oh yeah, that's sure that a lot of people will be more confused by such a change than changing, for instance, the default behaviour of drag-n-dropping files in nautilus from copy to move the file. Anyway, if you really don't want to confuse people, just leave the alt+middle-click thing and get alt+right-click to do the same, so that everybody is happy. And if you think that people might use alt+right-click to show the contextual menu while right-click by itself does the exact same thing, i think you're wrong.
the purpose of alt+rightclick is that it works anywhere on the window, not just the edge (in fact that's basically the point of all the alt+click actions)
I just came from WindowMaker and KDE to Gnome and I must say that it would be very nice if this were configurable at least... The only thing I use the window context menu for is to make the window visible on all desktops. Everything else (closing window, moving to other desktops, etc.) can be done much easier by other means (desktop pager, keyboard shortcuts, the big top-right close button, e.g.) Where this behaviour is really bad is when using a touchpad where you usually don't have a middle mouse button. It's really difficult to do a middle-click-and-hold on most touchpads. So yes, making this configurable would be great, if not actually changing it.
making mouse bindings configurable in a sane way is pretty hard, fwiw. (there's some old bug explaining why, along with the half-finished patch I gave up on)
Is it easy to change this behaviour in code? I don't mind patching metacity myself, if that's what it takes. I just really can't stand the alt+wheelclick behaviour, in fact I'd kill anyone just to get it changed.
Nat made a patch and posted on plant.gnome.org, but for some reason he didn't post it to bugzilla. Didn't look too long or complex, though that made me wonder if he got all the cases right considering Havoc's comments. *shrug*
*** Bug 337830 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
bug 83210 comment 35 appears to be the bug Havoc had in mind in comment 6; I'm going to mark as a duplicate. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 83210 ***