GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 516943
calendar appointments hard to edit
Last modified: 2016-06-24 15:55:28 UTC
currently, the appointments in the calendar have terrible usability because you have to double or triple click very fast, precisely, and the results are often unpredictable (ie: nothing happens even if you click ten times, or an event's text is selected at best) or undesirable (the appointment editing window shows up, but in the background due to metacity detecting a click or two just before it is created). Needless to say, this situation sucks horribly, especially since you can't move events by drag and drop (bug #328633). There are two simple workarounds to this situation (because, really, the user should not even have to double click here): - use single click. If the user clicks any appointment and that click is not a drag event, bring up the appointment editing window. - show an "edit" button in the toolbar (suboptimal).
i've never had any problems with it... what distro is this? which view?
I would guess it affects any distro (seen this for years on ubuntu, I don't remember on fedora), and it is on any view. Month view, week view. I'll shoot a small video showing the problem if I can.
Created attachment 105433 [details] brief video showing the problem (zoomed in screen for legibility) see also this longer video [1] (a screencast) with my narration and hypotheses of the problem; however in the video the mouse cursor does not show up exactly where it was in reality (I swear, I was clicking *inside* the appointments! :) For example, at 1:45, the tip of my cursor's arrow really did click precisely where the blinking text cursor was. [1]: http://jeff.ecchi.ca/public/evolution-bug-516943-2.ogg
Bumping version to a stable release.
I think I figured out part of the problem: you have to have the event already selected (1 click) before trying to double-click it to edit it. If the event is already selected, double-clicking pretty much always works. However, it should not be so. I should not have to triple-click-with-a-high-rate-of-failure if the event is not selected. Do you have a better idea of the cause behind this problem now? I think I somewhat understand why it's that way, but I can't really explain/describe it. Having an "Edit" button in the toolbar would help alleviate this issue, too.
Ok, the "edit directly in the calendar canvas view" thing is utterly broken. It even messes up and causes crap like Bug #578764. Could it please be thrown away and just replace this by "single clicking a calendar event opens the event properties dialog"? It would make everything much simpler and easier to use.
I suggest a new solution to this issue: Disable the "rename calendar event on single click" feature. Instead, when clicking on an event, open the edit dialog. Rationale: Editing calendar events is quite hard to do right now because even if you want to change e.g. date or time, you often end up editing the name. This would also fix bug #537048.