Re: not too happy with Emacs 21 vertical-line dragging when scrollbars present

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     I was under the impression that only GTK, Windows and Mac scroll bars
>     could not be dragged sideways.
>
> The built-in scroll bars used with the Lucid widgets can't be dragged
> sideways.  Which means that nearly all toolkits do not handle it.
>
> Too bad, it would have been a nice solution, but it is not feasible.
> I think we should leave things as they are.

I disagree that being able to drag scrollbars sideways would have
been a nice solution.  One of the most annoying "features" about the
Windows toolkit is that you can "skid off" scrollbars while dragging,
in which case the scrolled area jumps back to where it started until
you move the cursor back onto the scroll bar.

In general, when I am using a scrollbar by dragging in the vertical
direction, I don't want to be forced to keep the horizontal position
of the cursor "correct" as well.

Dragging a scrollbar horizontally when used with an additional
modifier key, like shift or control, might have been a possible idea,
but not in the course of normal operation.

Looking at the thread I am not sure that I understand what this
discussion tries to be actually about: it started by thinking about
whether dragging some vertical structure at the _side_ of the
scrollbar would be possible.  But if we are not clicking on the
scrollbar itself, the toolkit is not involved in the dragging, anyway.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum