[haiku] Re: Mouse "Click to focus" mode: what is it for?
- From: Stephan Assmus <superstippi@xxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:09:46 +0100
On 2010-03-19 at 11:41:06 [+0100], Simon Taylor <simontaylor1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> > 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).
Sorry, but I find this totally silly. Because you want to prevent feature
creep, you suggest to remove a single option which implements a uniform
behavior. To address the need covered by this option, you then suggest to
implement two other options, accessible via hidden features *and* in
Deskbar, where it is much more prominently (clutter!) placed then in the
Mouse prefs.
I want to remind that the Mouse prefs got *simplified*. We removed two
conceptually broken FFModes, and added one option that implements a
consistent alternative behavior that obviously a lot of users are familiar
with, at least all Amiga users.
Basically, the arguments are "clutter" and "not useful". Obviously it's
useful to a significant number of people, and the clutter argument is silly
when coupled with the suggestion to add even more clutter. The not "useful"
argument implies that people re-learn "the" Haiku way (let alone there's
always been four different BeOS ways before, and we already reduced them to
three). How about everyone in the world learns English, because frankly the
localization adds a lot of complexity and options - plus a slowdown when
starting applications, too. ;-)
Let's not forget that nobody cared about this single option until Koki
wondered what it was when translating the preflet. I really believe this
thing is getting way too much attention. Of course I agree that new
features should be discussed. This one has received a fair amount of
disussion, too, before it was commited to trunk, it's just been a while ago.
Best regards,
-Stephan
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