Re: Feature request: About ctrl+drag selection method.

On Wed, 5 Mar 2008 00:20:30 +0100
"Walther Maldonado" <walther.md@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Walther,

> Now, as you can imagine, I am very used to Gentoo's selection mechanics, and
> I miss that in EmelFM. Luckily, a moment ago I found it has support for this
> kind of selection.. except.... it is not quite optimal yet.
> 
> Ctrl+left click does not select an item right away until I start dragging.
> It appears the selection method is not started UNTIL I drag. Any particular
> reason for this?
We aim to coexist with (and work around) gtk's standard arrangements. Until a 
drag begins, we don't know that's what it is (our future-prediction talents are 
sadly lacking ...) Blocking gtk's normal operation until button-release was 
tested in the past, IMHO it sucked, not to mention interfering with dragging. 
So <Ctrl>left-btn-click per se just does what it normally does in gtk. It will 
select or deselect as soon as it can, of course.

This was all implemented before gtk had 'rubber-banding' capability, and I 
confess that I've never bothered to look into that much. But I suspect it 
involves a Shift-key too.

 Is not like you can configure mouse key-bindings yet, and I
> do not know what else you can do with Ctrl+Left click. This is a point of
> complaint because sometimes when I do Ctrl+left click and start dragging,
> the very item under the mouse position does not gets selected, since the
> selection process started after having dragged the mouse into the next item.
More particularly, gtk did its toggle while the drag was getting underway. An 
annoyance, but small and easily fixed - just drag the mouse back to the item 
that was omitted, and then resume dragging as you intended. See comment below 
about "painting"

> Ctrl+left click cannot be used to unselect items. Something that Gentoo had
> was that when you clicked over an already selected item and then started
> dragging, this time the process would be used for unselecting items (eg: I
> press ctr+left click to drag and select a selection of items, then I release
> the button, and again click and drag, but this time I start on an already
> selected item, meaning that the drag should remove items from the
> selection). Note that for the second part, items are unselected as soon as I
> click on them,
Presumably because that's what gtk does in that circumstance

 but if I drag a bit, they get added back into the list.

From your description it seems like gentoo's dragging might actually be a 
toggle-selection process

In effect, e2 is biassed toward selection. I want to be able to drag 
back-and-forth anywhere, to progressively select accessed items. Sort of like 
painting the dragged area, any order will do within a drag, and distinct drags 
are cumulative. That means the same mechanism is not available for deselection. 
You need to use gtk's deselection processes.


> Also, would it be possible to have a config option so that dragging works
> for selecting items without ctrl (and using ctrl for classical left click
> dragging)? I am aware it could "break" the selection convention of GTK, but
> if a user likes that selection mechanism and the program can make it
> available to him, I don't see why not give them the choice.
Well, not only would it be against convention, it would require active 
intervention to stop gtk from doing its normal thing. I'm not hearing enough 
interest to encourage me to investigate how to do that, or actually do it ...

Regards
Tom


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