Re: GtkTreeView discussion

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Sat, 2003-03-15 at 16:39, Ettore Perazzoli wrote:

> >  * Expansion: Expand on selection, expand on double click, or expand
> >    only when the arrow is clicked.
> 
> I think this is also a bad idea, since it introduces more
> inconsistencies between applications.  Expansion should only happen when
> the arrow is clicked; that's a standard GUI behavior that should not be
> overridden on a per-app basis.

I agree it would be nice not to have to make this per-app, but I'd
certainly like to see "make the default activation behaviour for each
row = expand/collapse unless the developer has over-ridden it to do
something else".  There seems little point in having a nice big mouse
target sitting there that's not doing anything else, when user tests
have often shown over the years people struggling to click the tiny
arrows in tree controls.

> >  * editing: Currently, the behavior for editing confuses users.  I'm not
> >    100% sure how we should fix it, but we should at least see how other
> >    toolkits do it.
> 
> AFAIK, in Cocoa if you mark a cell as "editable" double-click on the
> cell edits it, or at least that's the default behavior.  In those apps
> where double-clicks opens the item (like the Finder), slow double click
> triggers editing.

Much the same in Windoze IIRC, two single clicks (i.e. separated by more
than the system double-click interval) on the text in question put you
into edit mode (as does pressing F2, or rightclick->Edit, both of which
the TreeView should probably also support).

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems