On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, Frank Barknecht wrote:
I just got an alternatve idea: How about moving the connection using e.g. the cursor keys? When only a connection is selected, LEFT would move the inlet-connection one inlet left, Shift-LEFT would move the outlet connection left. Probably this should not be done using the cursor keys as they are also used to move objects.
Well, I don't think we should shy away from modal interfaces when they make sense.
What I propose is that the interface should:
* stay mostly non-modal for the mouse (just the Edit/Run duality, if that doesn't go away)
* become modal for the keyboard's arrows. Modes could be: 1. travelling around 2. moving selection 3. editing objectbox text 4. selecting an outlet or inlet for making connections or following existing connections 5. making a new connection
That would be because we don't have (m)any extra modifiers, as:
* Shift is already used for moving by larger amounts (i think it's by bunch of 8 pixels) * Ctrl is already used for instant-run-mode * Alt with arrows is often reserved by the window manager * Cmd is OSX-only and its PC equivalent is Alt or Ctrl depending on various whims * Meta is often the same as Alt and/or Escape * AltGr (or OSX Alt) is reserved for accented letters * And there's pretty much nothing else left (ScrollLock? haha).
Oh, and selecting connections by moving over them with the mouse would also make work more comfortable.
do you really mean selecting them, or just highlighting them?
also the in/outlet selection mouse-cursor is very bad on recent KDE desktops i've seen. This is why IMPD introduced highlighting of inlets/outlets.
____________________________________________________________________ Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada