[haiku] Suggestions to change double click on window title behaviour
- From: Johan Aires Rastén <johan@xxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:38:47 +0100
A little copy and paste from a comment I wrote on the forum, but I hear that
all the important people hang out on the mailing lists so I'll say it here
too.
I think double click on window title is a bad design, reasons listed below,
and therefore shouldn't be default behaviour.
- It's confusing for new people and when you do it by mistake. The window
just disappears and it might look like the app crashed or terminated. This
will be less of an issue if Haiku had some effect like OSX/Compiz that
actually shows the window minimizing to deskbar, but a lot of people seem to
think that's just unnecessary eye-candy.
- It can't be easily undone. For example if an OS had double click for
minimize to title (aka shade, which is another horrible mechanic, please
don't add it :)) at least you could double click again in the same place to
get your window back.
- Even if most people will eventually adapt to it, it's still not very user
friendly. You have LMB+drag to move window, LMB click to raise, LMB double
click to hide, RMB click to lower and Shift+LMB+drag to move tab (maybe
there are even some more that I haven't figured out yet.. who knows?). But
if people really dislike decorators that much, why not take it to the
extreme and remove the zoom and close buttons too! We could set Shift+LMB
double click to zoom and MMB to close window. Most people would probably
learn to use it after a while, but would it be user friendly?
- It's not intuitive. If I'm new to computers there's really no way to
remotely guess that the window is going to hide if I double click it's title
bar. People will figure this out by a) accident b) trying to maximize the
window or c) reading the manual (and nobody reads the manual) but until then
they'll just be wondering why you can't minimize windows in Haiku.
Some other OS might have dbl click to maximize (zoom) window instead, but
there's also a maximize button you can use and if you accidentally do it,
and at least it's very easy to figure out what's just happened if your app
now covers the entire screen.
- Other OS:es have separate buttons for minimize / maximize. Do you think
it's *only* because they copy eachother and have legacy UIs to think of, or
might there actually be a concious design decision behind this?
- The efficiency savings of double clicking the title compared to clicking
an icon on the title are microscopic. And you save a few pixels, but if
they're so valuable then why is the zoom button there?
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