Feature request: About ctrl+drag selection method.

  • From: "Walther Maldonado" <walther.md@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: emelfm2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2008 00:20:30 +0100

Hello there.

First of all, I must say I am quite impressed with development of emelfm.
The last time I used it it was still a gtk1.2 app, and not quite useful, I
settled for Gentoo back then. Recently I got tired of Gentoo's lack of Gtk2
support, so I started again my search for a filemanager... only to be
pleasantly surprised with the progress EmelFM has done in these years.

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? 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.

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

There are more advanced selection features in Gentoo (like ctrl+click was
used there to select/unselect all items of the same filetype), but I can
probably live without that.

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 this is my only gripe with the selection mechanics in EmelFM. Again,
you've done a terrific job with this file-manager so far, I really like it.

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