Re: [Usability] Discoverable off-screen window dragging

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

Hi,

On Nov 28, 2007 4:23 PM, Hans Petter Jansson <hpj novell com> wrote:
> I was told by one user that the way he worked around this was by going
> to the control panel, choosing a smaller font temporarily, moving the
> window, then setting the big font again. Of course, he was very happy to
> hear about the alt+drag shortcut.

The user couldn't grab the titlebar and click and drag?  Why the font change?

> A better idea might be something like the following logic in the window
> manager:
>
> IF window is focused AND
>    pointer is pushing against the edge of the screen AND
>    window has area off that edge of the screen AND

      the window is larger than the "screen" in the given direction AND

>    user is not dragging
> THEN
>    move the window in the opposite direction of the edge being pushed

Sounds reasonable, if the above addition is included.  However one
case to think about...do you mean off the edge of the screen, or off
the edge of the "screen".  Think about the case where the user has a
screen reader that takes up the right half the screen.  As screen
readers act like panels, this would make the "screen" size effectively
half the screen size.  Do you want to do scrolling in that case as
well?  Does the user have to hit the edge of the screen or the edge of
the "screen" to make the scrolling happen?

> So e.g. if you have a focused window which is partially off the
> right-hand side of the screen, and you push your pointer against that
> side, bumping into the edge, the window will move to the left until you
> can see its right-edge frame. The rate of movement would be equal to the
> number of pixels the pointer "wants" to move off-screen at each
> increment. Only the focused window would be affected.

A stupid question: How does one determine in the WM when the mouse is
hitting the edge of the screen and how much it would go past (so one
can know how much to scroll)?  I don't know about compiz, but metacity
at least doesn't get MotionNotify events unless it has done a grab for
some reason (e.g. during click-and-drag to move the window).


Elijah