[vtk-developers] Mouse behavior change in Charts?

[Eric E. Monson]

Hey Marcus,

Yes, I think my issues stem from a combination of selection-based applications, and how my non-charts views are coded. If there was an easy way to re-map the mouse buttons (like through an ivar, as you suggested) that would be perfect for me. I'm not a huge fan of the interactor styles, so I wouldn't push for that solution, either. The reason I'm brining this up now is that I'm trying to revisit the code for my recent GUI and make it easier to maintain (especially in light of the Charts classes constantly being improved), and just changing the mouse button mapping forces me to re-implement a lot of code in my slightly customized subclasses.

What is your primary development OS, or the ones you have easy access to? If you send me a note off-list I'd be glad to send you a "binary" package and some data to try out my GUI. I was in a rush to get _some_ version of it done by early July, so it's a tiny bit buggy and non-optimal, but I'm fairly happy with it.

Thanks a lot for getting back to me about this,
-Eric


On Aug 14, 2010, at 1:30 PM, Marcus D. Hanwell wrote:

> 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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