GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 696452
Pressure sensitivity for triggering the message tray is too high when using a touchpad
Last modified: 2015-02-23 22:28:31 UTC
Hi, I'm trying GNOME Shell 3.7.92 as part of the GNOME 3.7.92 ISO provided for testing. I like the pressure sensitivity feature added to open the message tray... with a mouse! With a touchpad, I struggle so much to open the message tray that I need to repeat my move several times and I must give as much strength which I found "painful". I have a feeling that opening the message tray with a touchpad requires luck and succeeds randomly. Dividing by two the constant MESSAGE_TRAY_PRESSURE_THRESHOLD (i.e. assiging the value 125) solved my issue with the touchpad but makes it to sensitive with a mouse. Of course it's a very personal opinion/setting. So this bug report hide also a feature request: could this constant depends on the input device that used and it's resolution?
Same for trackpoint here. Bottom message bar is a pain to activate. With the mouse it's neat, but with the trackpoint you just don't want to do it. There are better things to ruin my finger for :-)
We tried to find a good value that worked across all devices, but it was a bit of a stopgap. One thing you might not be aware of is that there's two ways to activate it. You can do a full-screen "gesture", where if you push with a very high velocity, it will trigger immediately. Additionally, you can also "push" slowly against the bottom of the screen with multiple repeated strokes, which tends to work better on touchpads or similar devices rather than one gesture.
I just tried with two smaller pushes which works too - but I simply cannot reliably trigger it with my trackpoint. When it works, it's better (but still requires more pushing force than I like with the trackpoint), but since I am apparently too stupid to trigger it reliably with two pushes, it's not really helping a lot. (the required timing seems to be rather fast and it still seems to want quite some push force)
Thank you, I never noticed that! Once my pointer is at the bottom of the screen, pushing it SLOWLY does the job quite well with a touchpad whereas if you try to do it fast it succeeds randomly. What's annoying there is that if you want to trigger the message tray with one motion, it is simply not possible (go to the bottom then push slowly). If it's okay for the message tray, it's more of a problem to open the activity overview (you want to do it fast, without thinking of it). Believe it or not, I had a tendonitis of forefinger last month... The reason was that I was using the touchpad of my laptop and simply spending too much time on my computer ;-) It made me laugh a lot (and so my friends) but I realize that repetitive strain injury can also happen when using a computer (don't worry, it wasn't GNOME Shell fault!).
Try using the pressure visualizer extension as a way to explain it? https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/634/tray-pressure-visualizer/
What is there left to explain? The one-move gesture requires too much pressure for trackpoint/touchpad, and the two move gesture cannot be triggered reliably if done fast (and slow is obviously not really fun to do either).
*** Bug 702854 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
If it's a setting that's hard to get right for everybody, seems like the obvious solution is to let everybody adjust it manually if they find the default isn't working. Is there any way to do this now?
We have a new notifications design [1], and we don't use pressure sensitivity for opening the tray any more. Closing as obsolete. [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/Notifications/