On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 4:48 PM, Diederik van Lierop<mail@...1689...> wrote:

1. We could distinguish between pressing ctrl before or after pressing the

mouse button, but that's not very attractive. 2) We could leave the ctrl key for deleting, and do a constrained translation of the origin only when the guide is grabbed near its origin, and do a free translation of the guide when grabbing it elsewhere (and positioning the origin at the location where we release the mouse button). 3) We could find another way to easily delete guides and use ctrl for constrained translation. That's what most consistent because ctrl is used in many cases already for constrained transformations. But I'm afraid that people already got used to ctrl-click deletion, so we will have to find a _really_ good alternative if we want to get consensus on this.  What about pressing the delete key when already dragging? It's a bit more laborious than just ctrl-click, but it's close to being perfect IMHO. Any other suggestions?

What's wrong with only constrained rotating with Ctrl+Shift, and deleting with Ctrl? This is what we have in the code right now and it works for me.

2009/7/8 Diederik van Lierop <mail@...1689...>:

So we will end up like this A) when dragging with no modifiers we will move the origin to the pointer location (freely, in 2D) B) with ctrl we will have a constrained translation of the origin along the guide C) with shift we will rotate D) with ctrl-shift we will rotate to increments of the absolute angle E) when pressing delete when hovering above a guide in the selector tool, or while dragging a guide, the guide will be deleted. We can even add a context menu as Luca suggested

If I remember correctly then this quick-deleting was not available in v0.46, or was it? We'd better change (or at least find consensus on either solution) now, before we hit the masses!

I agree. And I'd vote for the above suggestion, too, because it's the most consistent and foreseeable. Indeed, quick-deleting with Ctrl+click was introduced not so long ago, more or less as a quick solution and because it wasn't foreseeable that full translation/rotation abilities of guides were going to be implemented soon. Now that these are availabe I'd personally vote for the more consistent set of controls as described by Diederik above. The only small thing is that I find it a bit inconvenient to use Delete because it's located at the top right corner of the keyboard instead of conveniently on the lower left. But it's still good enough, I guess. Perhaps we can additionally have something like Ctrl+Alt+Click for quick-deletion (or something similar; I don't know what would be most appropriate)?

Max

For what it's worth, I suppose you already know that I completely agree. I hope you'll find time to work on it soon.

Luca

Diederik van Lierop wrote:

On 07/08/2009 04:44 AM, Maximilian Albert wrote:

2009/7/8 Diederik van Lierop &lt;mail@...1689...&gt; :

So we will end up like this

A) when dragging with no modifiers we will move the origin to the pointer location (freely, in 2D) B) with ctrl we will have a constrained translation of the origin along the guide C) with shift we will rotate D) with ctrl-shift we will rotate to increments of the absolute angle E) when pressing delete when hovering above a guide in the selector tool, or while dragging a guide, the guide will be deleted. We can even add a context menu as Luca suggested

If I remember correctly then this quick-deleting was not available in v0.46, or was it? We'd better change (or at least find consensus on either solution) now, before we hit the masses!

I agree. And I'd vote for the above suggestion, too, because it's the most consistent and foreseeable.

Hi Max, thanks for chimming in!

So if no one has any serious objections then I'll go ahead and change this as soon as possible.

Diederik

---

Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel

2009/7/8 Diederik van Lierop <mail@...1689...>:

So we will end up like this A) when dragging with no modifiers we will move the origin to the pointer location (freely, in 2D) B) with ctrl we will have a constrained translation of the origin along the guide C) with shift we will rotate D) with ctrl-shift we will rotate to increments of the absolute angle E) when pressing delete when hovering above a guide in the selector tool, or while dragging a guide, the guide will be deleted. We can even add a context menu as Luca suggested

I just commited the corresponding changes to SVN (rev. 21846). Please test extensively and report anything which is not yet as desired or can still be improved. Apart from the things listed above, I also made the cursor switch correctly between rotation and translation depending on whether Shift is pressed or not (this didn't work 100% before) and also removed the info about keyboard modifiers from the guides dialog (the one which opens when double-clicking on a guide) because it's essentially useless there and consumes a lot of space.

Some comments or issues I couldn't resolve:

1) There is a strange bug which can reproduced as follows: Start Inkscape afresh and drag a guide out of the ruler. Then hover the mouse over it and press Delete. Nothing happens, and the status bar shows the message "Nothing was deleted". Now click anywhere on the canvas, hover again over the guide and press Delete. This time the guide gets deleted as intended. Even when the canvas-click occurs before creating the guide, everything is normal. It seems a bit like the canvas first has to be "activated" before keyboard events are processed correctly.

The reason for this strange behaviour is that the first time the key press is not propagated to sp_dt_guide_event() but gets caught earlier and is then processed in sp_selection_delete(). However, after the canvas-click the propagation to sp_dt_guide_event() works fine. I have no clue where this comes from and any hints are greatly appreciated. BTW, this is also the reason why the cursor doesn't change when you hover over a newly created guide and press Shift (this also only works after a canvas-click).

2) I don't know what to include in the status bar message. With a description of all modifiers the message is definitely too long. Right now I have it say "Shift+drag to rotate, Ctrl+drag to move origin, Del to delete". In particular, I dropped "Drag to move" because it seemed to me that users would expect this intuitively. Other suggestions?

3) IMHO it would be nice if the kind of guide movement could change interactively when pressing/releasing a modifier while dragging a guide. For example, when we start dragging and press Shift (while continuing to drag) it would be nice if the motion switched to a rotation. Or when starting to move the origin by Ctrl+dragging and releasing the Ctrl key then the motion should switch to regular dragging. What do you think? I tried to implement this but encountered a bug similar to the one described in (1) which prevents some keyboard events from being passed to sp_dt_guide_event(). I'm not sure if it's caused by the same thing, though. Any hints where to look are again highly appreciated.

4) LucaDC said he felt that the new cursor which appeared when dragging a guide conveyed a feeling of imprecision, so I changed it back to the original arrow-shaped cursor. For rotation, however, I still use the new cursor. Is everyone happy with that?

5) In principle, snapping guides to other objects should work, but I only manage to snap guides to other guides and to nothing else. Diederik?

6) As mentioned above, guides are now deleted by pressing Del when hovering over them. Is this sufficient or should we implement a second shortcut similar to the original one (like Alt+Ctrl+click)?

Thanks for any comments! Regards, Max

Hi,

Is it possible to prevent the guide line from being moved when double clicking on it (i.e. when opening the guide-line dialog)? The movement make the "Relative change" option rather pointless as well as messing up carefully set x and y values.

Tav

Hi Max,

...

   Is it possible to prevent the guide line from being moved when double

clicking on it (i.e. when opening the guide-line dialog)? The movement make the "Relative change" option rather pointless as well as messing up carefully set x and y values.

Sorry, but I cannot reproduce the problem. When I manually set the position of a guide (e.g., via the guidelines dialog itself) and then double click on it, I always get the same coordinates back when the dialog opens. Can you give precise steps how to see the problem?

Hmmm, a little investigation shows that the problem only happens when I am using the mouse with my Wacom tablet. If I use the laptop track pad and buttons, the guide lines don't move.

Tav

Great work!

In particular, I dropped "Drag to move" because it seemed to me that users would expect this intuitively. Other suggestions?

I agree.

3. IMHO it would be nice if the kind of guide movement could change

interactively when pressing/releasing a modifier while dragging a guide.

I think that this could be confusing. Anyway, if you think it would be useful...

4. LucaDC said he felt that the new cursor which appeared when

dragging a guide conveyed a feeling of imprecision, so I changed it back to the original arrow-shaped cursor.

Thanks a lot. :)

For rotation, however, I still use the new cursor. Is everyone happy with that?

I am. The problem was grabbing the guide: after the operation has started you don't need precision in the cursor anymore as you look at the object you are moving, not at the cursor, I think (at least I do so).

6. As mentioned above, guides are now deleted by pressing Del when

hovering over them. Is this sufficient or should we implement a second shortcut similar to the original one (like Alt+Ctrl+click)?

I won't add more shortcuts: then you have do document them, add a message on the status bar and so on...

Thanks for any comments! Regards, Max

Thanks to you.

Just let me add a couple of things: - delete doesn't work for me (Windows) while dragging the guide (actually, I don't think it's important); - we spoke about showing the origin only when needed, so while dragging, rotating its guide or sliding through it; is this difficoult to implement? - there's still no snapping while moving the origin throug the guide. (ok, I know they are three... :)

Luca

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel

On 07/17/2009 06:16 PM, LucaDC wrote:

If we want to snap objects to the origin of the guide then the origin should probably be visible at all time. Do we want to snap to guide origins?

My opinon is that I won't snap on guides origins: a guide is a guide and shouldn't have "preferences" over its points. If you want to snap to a particular point you can use two guides and snap to the intersection. Also, I prefer not seeing all those little circles on the drawing: when there are a lot of guides I find them visually disturbing and sometimes I drag them out of view to clean things up.

...

• there's still no snapping while moving the origin throug the guide.

Works for me! (but please remind that snapping guides to grids has not been implemented yet). Can you give me a bit more details, e.g. what snapping options have been enabled and what the steps are to reproduce this behavior?

I simply expect the origin to snap wherever the guide snaps when dragging it in 2D. Now this doesn't happen for me in WXP. E.g.: - draw a rectangle; - add a guide and snap it to a corner (e.g. bottom-left); - rotate the guide so it snaps to the opposite corner (e.g. top-right); - drag the center on the guide to snap it on the opposite corner (top-right): it doesn't.

Luca

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel

Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

Well, I've grown to love Ctrl+Click, but I won't bitch about this change even if deleting guides is longer now :)

Yes, deleting guides is longer now, indeed: I always ctrl-click first, then remember it doesn't work anymore and finally press delete... :) I hope I'll get used as quickly as I learned ctrl-click.

One drawback of del is that if you have an object selected, you hover on a guide to delete it but slightly move the mouse just before pressing del, you delete the object. It's so difficoult to highlight a guide being the selection margin so narrow! Maybe a way to click-select the guide to delete (so the guide remains selected also after you move the mouse away from it) would simplify the operation. And you could also select many guides (with shift) and delete them all together with a single "del".

In fact, there is still the (old) problem of deleting many guides (non all guides!): let me suggest something like a "guide rubber", i.e. something like a selection rectangle that kills every guide it intersects or a particular "fat" cursor that annihilates all guides it's clicked on.

Ah, and click-selecting guides could also allow copy-paste to generate a new guide starting from an existing one, which is useful when you have strange-angled guides. And you could move a "guide set" to a different point...

Sorry, too many things!

Luca

On 07/16/2009 05:31 PM, Maximilian Albert wrote:

3. IMHO it would be nice if the kind of guide movement could change

interactively when pressing/releasing a modifier while dragging a guide.

Yes, I agree that that would be nice. However I don't have a clue what's going on in that bug you mentioned.

One little quirk I noticed when dragging the origin with ctrl: If you press shift too then the pointer changes to rotation, but you cannot actually rotate.

Diederik

2009/7/17 Vladimir Savic <vladimir.firefly.savic@...400...>:

I might be too late, [...]

It is never too late in open source software. :-) However, I'd like to hear other people's opinions on this before implementing it because I've used Inkscape very little for real production work lately so that I feel I can't thoroughly judge usability questions.

but it seems to me that we will have more consistent behavior if we follow existing keybinding of other tools. For example, here is what "Inkscape keyboard and mouse reference" says,

*Ctrl+Alt+mouse drag - move along handles* This restricts movement to the directions of the node's handles, their continuations and perpendiculars (total 8 snaps).

Ignoring rotation part, Ctrl+Alt will, with this modification, still move handle point along (guide) line.

This small change would make behavior of somehow similar tools (to some extent), well, similar. The only difference would be Shift becoming from

• no-snap modifier to - rotate modifier.

I'm not sure if I understood the last paragraph correctly. Just to make sure, your suggestion is to use Ctrl+Alt instead of Ctrl for moving the anchor along the guide, right? Frankly, I'm not convinced. If we implement this change then the Ctrl modifier (whithout Alt) will be unused. Firstly, this forces the user to unnecessarily press a second modifier to obtain constrained movement, which is cumbersome, and secondly, it makes the feature a little less discoverable. In the Node tool the Ctrl modifier alone also has a certain meaning, and it is also related to constrained movement (as is generally the case in Inkscape), so my personal opinion is that the analogy is still there and we should leave it as it is. But I'm open to different opinions. What do other people think?

Max

The reason I didn't suggest to think about a new way to delete guides is the same that you explained: it's really difficoult to find a good alternative. Ctrl-click is strange (I often did it by mistake at the beginning) but when you get used it's easy. I was used to drag the guide outside the canvas but now I never do so anymore (also if I've seen it works in Inkscape too now, I can't say since when).

Left-click and select "delete guide"? Now there is no specific context menu for guides. But the new command should be very quick as the plugin for deleting all guides is not easily reachable and one could need to delete a lot of guides but not all existing ones.

I really have no other suggestions but either keeping the distance-dependent-click or introducing a new modifier. Up to now I would keep the former as it's already implemented. I agree it's a pity that ctrl-click was allocated to something that has nothing to do with constrained moving. Personally I could sacrifice the quick-deleting command to coherence, but I feel it's not a practical solution.

Luca

Diederik van Lierop wrote:

On 07/06/2009 10:35 AM, LucaDC wrote:

I'd only warn about using ctrl alone as modifier as it's already in use to delete the guide. You could end up in accidentally deleting the guide of which you want to move the origin.

Good point, I hadn't thought of that yet but I would have certainly run into this problem. Thanks!

1. We could distinguish between pressing ctrl before or after pressing

the mouse button, but that's not very attractive. 2) We could leave the ctrl key for deleting, and do a constrained translation of the origin only when the guide is grabbed near its origin, and do a free translation of the guide when grabbing it elsewhere (and positioning the origin at the location where we release the mouse button). 3) We could find another way to easily delete guides and use ctrl for constrained translation. That's what most consistent because ctrl is used in many cases already for constrained transformations. But I'm afraid that people already got used to ctrl-click deletion, so we will have to find a _really_ good alternative if we want to get consensus on this.&nbsp; What about pressing the delete key when already dragging? It's a bit more laborious than just ctrl-click, but it's close to being perfect IMHO. Any other suggestions?

Diederik

Diederik van Lierop wrote:

So:

A) when dragging with no modifiers we will move the origin to the pointer location (freely, in 2D) B) with ctrl we will have a constrained translation of the origin along the guide C) with shift we will rotate D) with ctrl-shift we will rotate to increments of the absolute angle

and with A), B), and C) Inkscape will snap depending on the snapping parameters.

It looks like we're converging here, aren't we ;-) ? What do you think?

Diederik

---

---

Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel

---

---

Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel