Getting back/forward mouse buttons working as default

[Chris Jones]

Hi

On Thu, January 6, 2005 16:15, Eric Dunbar said:
> That's _exactly_ why it's a great app with amazing potential. In my

I agree that imwheel is a great app, I used to use it myself to wrangle
sane scrolling behaviour out of Netscape. However, I think it's generally
better if applications have sane and fairly consistent scrolling behaviour
out of the box. If you want the fine grained control, install imwheel and
override the defaults. I also completely agree with your point about
improving the imwheel configuration because it's clearly useful to some
users (does it still make you scroll like crazy to bring up the config?)

> imwheel is on the cusp of being able to provide this functionality to
> Linux WITH THE SAME EASE OF USE -- the code base and (more

With sane default behaviours either in the applications or provided by a
default imwheel configuration (that someone has to make and check against
all the scrolling applications and keep checking) the user isn't going to
notice what is making it work like that and the majority of users aren't
going to really care to tweak lots of scroll configuration settings, so it
makes more sense to provide the sane defaults in the applications, run one
less daemon and leave the door open for enthusiasts to install imwheel and
go wild ;)

> Of course, I can say it's "EASY" from my high horse since I'm still a
> few years away from possessing the requisite programming skills, but

I don't wish to cast any aspersions on your skills, I haven't used imwheel
for a while and I've never seen your code :)

I would suggest that given the goals of gnome, having the users needing to
program bits of it, no matter how simple, is unsuitable as a default
behaviour.

> to do is more in line with the configuration philosophy inherent to
> Linux (and just because it's configurable doesn't mean that it has to

Obviously I only speak for myself here, but I think the gnome HIG's:

"avoid the trap of allowing too much configuration, or allowing the
configuration of parameters that most users will not understand or find
useful to modify"

applies here. If imwheel was running by default its configuration tool
would be about the most complicated among the various gnome settings
programs presented in the ubuntu menus. Just for scrolling that seems out
of balance.

Cheers,
-- 
Chris Jones
  cmsj at tenshu.net
   www.tenshu.net