[vtk-developers] Mouse behavior change in Charts?

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

Hi Eric,

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 5:06 PM, Eric E. Monson <emonson at cs.duke.edu> wrote:

> Hey Marcus,
>
> Could I suggest a change to the mouse behavior in the Charts -- especially
> in the XY chart? It has worked out better for me when I remapped the
> behavior such that I have:
>
> Left: Select
> Middle: Pan (move)
> Right: Zoom
>
> I know that in the 3d render windows left controls spinning, but already in
> the parallel coordinates plot the left is used for selection, and the rubber
> band type interactors use left for selection. In a standard render window
> right is already used for zooming, so this makes it more consistent with
> what people might expect, and middle is already the standard for panning in
> 3d. Also, middle for selection makes it very hard to make a selection
> without zooming if you have a wheel-type mouse.
>
> In my applications where I mix standard render windows with charts, and
> have a lot of linked selections between views, this mouse mapping has felt
> much more natural to myself and my users. It may be too late for this type
> of change, but I thought I'd put it out there, just in case.
>

I still want to get my hands on some of your examples to see what you are
doing with the charts ;-) Early on we decided not to use the interactor
styles to abstract these details, but perhaps this is something that I
should reconsider. I can see how different users would have different ideas
about which buttons should do what.

In my humble opinion, the mouse buttons are well mapped in the XY charts,
and are what I would expect. That said, if you have a largely selection
based workflow I can see why you might prefer that to be mapped to the left
mouse button. This could be stored in an ivar, that sets what mouse button
does what (keeping the current defaults but allowing it to be overridden
more easily by users of the classes).

Let me think about it, and see if I can gather more feedback.

Marcus
--
Marcus D. Hanwell, Ph.D.
R&D Engineer, Kitware Inc.
(518) 881-4937
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