[haiku] Re: Mouse "Click to focus" mode: what is it for?
- From: Simon Taylor <simontaylor1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:41:06 +0000
> As you can see from the
> responses, not only Brecht finds this mode useful. :-) Anyone who thinks
> this mode is silly, please just ignore it.
>
> Best regards,
> -Stephan
I'm a bit with Koki here. One of the biggest selling points of Haiku is
that "it's not Linux" - there's a consistent approach to the whole OS.
The biggest threat to this actually happening is one of the biggest
problems with all open-source projects: feature-creep happens all too
easily. Someone does some work, they find it useful, others find it
useful too, so it is added to the main tree. It only adds one more
option to one preference panel, so no one can claim it really adds
complexity, right?
In order to prevent this getting out-of-hand, there needs to be a bit
more to the criteria to adding a new feature (especially a new "mode"
that changes something fundamental about how the OS responds to events)
than just "someone finding it useful". That leads down the road
signposted Linux and I think most of us don't want to go there.
In this particular example, maybe we need to think about some of the
problems actually discussed. Some people have mentioned they'd use this
mode in rare cases where there are overlapping windows that they want to
copy things into. Surely for rare cases they don't want to have to fire
up the mouse settings window to change the global system-wide option?
Wouldn't a better approach be able to "pin" windows in the z-order,
perhaps through opt-click on the tab to pin to front and opt-right click
to pin to back? This could also be an option in deskbar's menu for the
windows. Alternatively a "pin" icon in the tab near the zoom button. One
could then have a preference for whether new windows should be pinned by
default, and the whole thing would feel a lot less like some different
modes hacked into the existing framework (no offense intended to those
who did the work).
Simon
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