On Thu, 20 Nov 2003, Yemu wrote:
Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 08:44:44 +0000 From: Yemu <yemu@...7...> To: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Inkscape-devel] mouse wheel
i've just updated my copy of inkscape and i have one suggestion concerning mouse wheel support. inkscape now uses wheel to move vertically, ctrl+wheel to move horizontally and shift+wheel to zoom in/out. in other applications (mozilla, opera, abiword, openoffice, corel draw) ctrl+wheel zooms (i know, i know in gimp shift+wheel zooms :-). so maybe it would be possible to have ctrl+wheel zoom? or both ctlr+wheel or shift+whell zoom, and for example alt +wheel move horizontally.
I did a little comparison research when Abiword implemented this and there are plenty of applications using this in a consistant way.
The defacto standard is Zooming with Ctrl+Wheel (up & down == Zoom in & out). Wheel should scroll the page up and down, and Shift+Wheel should Scroll sideways.
I also rather angrily made the point to another project that it is just insane to use Page Up and Page Down by default for something other than the blindingly obvious moving up and down the page (by all means use the shift and ctrl modifiers to make it do something else). Note I said 'by default' because if you follow my advice users can still rebind the keys to a menu item but if you bind PageUp PageDn to menu items there is no easy way for me to make PageUp do exactly what it is supposed to do! (Bitter bitter lemons. I was upset that I even had to explain this to them it was so blindingly obvious to me. It makes me upset just to explain it again).
In that same vein it makes most sense to me to use the Arrow Keys to nudge the currently selected object by a very small amount (and if no object is selected to move up/down a small amount of the page, and again by all means use shift and ctrl modifiers with the arrow keys to do something else if you want).
I'm not sure what the current behaviour of the GIMP 1.3/2.0 is and would urge you not to follow the GIMP in this case when many applications consistantly do things as I and Yemu have described.
Best to use Alt modifiers as the last option.
(Feel free to skip this, Explanation: I also wouldn't recommend extreme caution before using alt as an accelorator and to use Ctrl and or Shift first. Some platforms use Alt as the main modifier/command key instead of Control (BeOS, and one of the really old crappy versions of Netscape I was using somewhere around the University) and many platforms use Alt to access menus (such as Alt+F to access the _File menu) and you dont want shortcuts to collide or to have a workflows that users might accidentally trip over.)
Hope that helps.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/