mouse clicks on tool-bar -- why not recognize different mouse buttons?

mouse clicks on tool-bar -- why not recognize different mouse buttons?

[Drew Adams]

It looks like all mouse click events on tool-bar items have the same effect.
Or, rather, it looks like keyboard modifiers are taken into account, but all
mouse buttons are treated alike.

Except for the keyboard modifiers, this is like the treatment of menus in
the menu-bar (which doesn't recognize keyboard modifiers). This is standard
for menus -- you generally want a menu item to mean the same thing (what the
item says), regardless of keyboard modifiers or which mouse button was used.

However, since a tool-bar item is just a graphic (not a specific name, like
a menu item), why not treat tool-bar items more like we treat portions of
the mode-line: why not recognize different mouse button events on tool-bar
items? Why not, say, be able to have mouse-3 on a given tool-bar button do
something different from mouse-1 on the same item?

Re: mouse clicks on tool-bar -- why not recognize different mouse buttons?

[Jan D.]

>
> However, since a tool-bar item is just a graphic (not a specific name, 
> like
> a menu item), why not treat tool-bar items more like we treat portions 
> of
> the mode-line: why not recognize different mouse button events on 
> tool-bar
> items? Why not, say, be able to have mouse-3 on a given tool-bar 
> button do
> something different from mouse-1 on the same item?

No other application I know of does this.  Emacs is already very 
different
from standard GUI applications, and adding more Emacs specific GUI 
things
will only make it harder to port to current and future toolkits.  Also, 
what
kind of operations do you have in mind?

	Jan D.

Re: mouse clicks on tool-bar -- why not recognize different mouse buttons?

[Miguel Frasson]

"Jan D." <jan.h.d@swipnet.se> writes:

> > However, since a tool-bar item is just a graphic (not a specific name,
> > like
> > a menu item), why not treat tool-bar items more like we treat portions of
> > the mode-line: why not recognize different mouse button events on
> > tool-bar
> > items? Why not, say, be able to have mouse-3 on a given tool-bar button
> > do
> > something different from mouse-1 on the same item?
> 
> No other application I know of does this.  Emacs is already very different
> from standard GUI applications, and adding more Emacs specific GUI things
> will only make it harder to port to current and future toolkits.  Also,
> what
> kind of operations do you have in mind?

Other mouse buttons could be bound, for example, for a popup menu for
customization, properties or related actions.  In firefox (maybe mozilla
is the same), for instance, a right click in the bookmark toolbar allows
customization.  It would be interesting to allow user to customize a
toolbar button, if it makes sense, by right-clicking on it, and selecting
"Customize this button", or "customize toolbar" there.  Think in a "Print"
button.  One can just print pushing it, but one could select printer,
select printing options, etc.  Why allow Control + click and not
right-button click, for instance?

Maybe, it was a implementation not-so-fortunate decision that toolbar
buttons are bounded to fake keys in tool-bar-map, and only modifiers can
be added (different mouse buttons don't generate modifiers)... This is the
problem on changing now.  However, if we have fake keys, why not to have
fake modifiers, in some sense?

Miguel.

-- 
Miguel Vinicius Santini Frasson
http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~frasson

Re: mouse clicks on tool-bar -- why not recognize different mouse buttons?

[Dhruva Krishnamurthy]

On 15 Oct 2004 09:02:17 +0200, Miguel Frasson
<frasson@acrab.math.leidenuniv.nl> wrote:
> Other mouse buttons could be bound, for example, for a popup menu for
> customization, properties or related actions.  In firefox (maybe mozilla
> is the same), for instance, a right click in the bookmark toolbar allows
> customization.  It would be interesting to allow user to customize a
> toolbar button, if it makes sense, by right-clicking on it, and selecting
> "Customize this button", or "customize toolbar" there.  Think in a "Print"
> button.  One can just print pushing it, but one could select printer,
> select printing options, etc.  Why allow Control + click and not
> right-button click, for instance?

My views, I may be wrong though:
Usually, all right mouse button clicks are made to show Contextual
Menus, which means based on the context where the user has clicked,
the appropriate menus are shown. I guess this is a standard Windoze
GUI behavior. Each entity can over ride some methods (we do it through
C++ interfaces in our development) which will show the context
specific menu. I feel it is a good idea to let each entity to decide
what needs to be show when a RMB click is done. The emacs engine must
just identify the entity under the cursor and call it's implementation
of the contextual menu.

with best regards,
dhruva

-- 
Proud FSF member: #1935
http://schemer.fateback.com/

Re: mouse clicks on tool-bar -- why not recognize different mouse buttons?

[Richard Stallman]

    However, since a tool-bar item is just a graphic (not a specific name, like
    a menu item), why not treat tool-bar items more like we treat portions of
    the mode-line: why not recognize different mouse button events on tool-bar
    items? Why not, say, be able to have mouse-3 on a given tool-bar button do
    something different from mouse-1 on the same item?

It might be an interesting idea, but right now we want to focus
on getting bugs fixed for a new release--not on ideas for new
features.

Can you help with debugging any problems?