TouchPad Dragging

[skfir]

Hi there! The idea is when one uses a touchpad it is not fast enough to move a cursor from one side of the screen to the opposite in one motion. so you have to raise your finger and put it back on the touch pad. So, when you are dragging an object using a touch pad + double tap it is necessary to have a short delay between you raise your finger and an object being dragged to fall, in order to give you time to move your finger to the opposite side of a touch pad in order to continue dragging, if you haven't reached the desired aim. In Haiku there is no any delay in my Dell e5400. As soon as you raise your finger the object is being dropped. And if you were not successful in reaching the desired folder to move the dragged object in , for instance, it is dropped between windows :) So I don't know whether it is an issue with my pad only, but there is no any delay and thus it is impossible to use touch pad drugging really.

[skfir]

Also it would be grate if windows's buttons, such as close or minimise are availible when a window is not active, so if you want to close a window you don't have to activate it and then close, you can just close.

[anevilyak]

The "Accept First Click" setting in the Mouse preferences will do exactly that. Your dragging issue sounds like it'd be better solved by tweaking the mouse acceleration settings in mouse prefs as well.

[humdinger]

So, when you are dragging an object using a touch pad + double tap it is necessary to have a short delay between you raise your finger and an object being dragged to fall, in order to give you time to move your finger to the opposite side of a touch pad in order to continue dragging, if you haven't reached the desired aim.

Apparently, I'm not a big touch pad user... I never even tried to tap&hold+drag. That really works after a bit of training[[BR]] Even cooler, and making your enhancement moot: when you reach the edge of your touchpad, the icon continues to float onwards. So, no need to lift your finger at all. (This is hrev33939 BTW)

I don't think your proposed delay for repositioning your finger on the touchpad is a good one. If I lift my finger to drop the icon, I don't want to wait on a timeout. It should just drop instantly.

[axeld]

I would agree with humdinger here. If you really want to lift your fingers instead, you should press a mouse button with the other hand while doing so :-)

[stippi]

I agree with what Humdinger and Axel said. When I use the Touchpad, and I use tap-dragging a lot, I make a subconscious distinction between short and far drag distances and so I automatically use tap-dragging and button-dragging accordingly. This takes a little training, but the alternative, to always have a delay between releasing the drag and the actual mouse-up event, that would be pretty annoying. I am almost tempted to mark this ticket as invalid - but - as Humdinger describes, the touchpad driver can make the mouse continue to float in the last direction when you reach the boundary. He has this built into his touchpad hardware, and so do I on my Thinkpad T60. But obviously not all touchpads automatically do this. So I am keeping this ticket open to describe exactly this possible enhancement, but for doing it in software.

[skfir]

Yeah guyz! If it is made in software like that - it is good. But when I am talking about a delay - I am not talking about seconds - I am talking about milliseconds, the total amount of which is possible to tune in touchpad settings. This feature is widely used in MACs and is very cool. Even no need to train yourself. Try it.

[stippi]

Actually, when I last used a Mac an a window kept sticking to my mouse cursor after I tap-dragged it and raised my finger from the pad in the meantime, I considered it a bug.

[skfir]

No, it was not a bug

[axeld]

FWIW I also thought this to be a bug. I wouldn't want to see this in Haiku.

[skfir]

OK Probably you are right, but in any way, it is in my opinion a good idea to do something with that. So the OWNER is correct - if it is the automatic motion - it will be good for all of us.

[humdinger]

...the touchpad driver can make the mouse continue to float in the last direction when you reach the boundary. He has this built into his touchpad hardware, and so do I on my Thinkpad T60

I didn't know that it's a hardware feature.

BTW: chalk one more up for Haiku! Ubuntu 9.10 does not support this feature (at least not out of the box like Haiku. There may be a setting hidden somewhere deep in the Koala preference panel jungle or even deeper in some text config desert...)