Re: Theory question on desktop and gmc

[jg pa dec com (Jim Gettys)]

> From: Michael ROGERS <M.Rogers@cs.ucl.ac.uk>
> Resent-From: gnome-list@gnome.org
> Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 18:23:15 +0100
> To: gnome-list@gnome.org
> Subject: Re: Theory question on desktop and gmc
> -----
> >Hey, here's an idea - Traditionally in X, middle-click is paste, right? So
> >we can use middle-click for maybe pasting files.. Imagine - Select a bunch
> >of files in gmc on one desktop, zip to another desktop with another gmc,
> >and hit the middle button - boom, files appear. Possibly also, select a
> >bunch of files, go to a window (say, gnumeric or whatever the GNOME
> >wordproc is) and hit the middle-button - files are inserted/filenames
> >inserted/OLE-style links, whatever.
> >
> >Yeah, I guess it's just dragging with a different face.. I'm guessing that
> >you can't drag between desktops so this would come in handy (well, maybe
> >you can in E, but not in window maker). And it *is* consistent with X11
> >generally.
> 
> Great idea! Middle click to "pick up" a selection, do whatever you need to do
> with the left and right buttons to move to the drop site, and middle click
> again to "drop".
> 
> By the way, is it possible to drag and drop files into archives? Perhaps we
> could have a MIME key which defines the action to be taken when a file is
> dropped onto another file?
> 
> 

This is the time I wish Phil Karlton was still alive... (he died a couple
years ago in a car accident...).

One other item that was a major win on Xerox desktops in days of yore
was "shift" selection.

The idea is the following:

If the shift key is down when you select some text, it is sent to
the original owner of the input focus as soon as the up event occurs
on the mouse button.

This allows you to go grab things anywhere on the screen and cause the
text to occur as input...

The right thing to do is probably to talk to someone who has been
there and done that before in this whole area.  Unfortunately, I'm not
quite sure who to suggest.
				- Jim