Mouse controls (was: Re: Survex 1.1.3 test version uploaded)

[Mark Shinwell]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 03:28:45PM +0100, Olly Betts wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 12:17:03AM +0100, Brian Clipstone wrote:
> > A few problems I have found:
> > I am running Survex on Win 98.
> > 
> > Aven:     Mouse on left click does not rotate cave when you move mouse left
> > or right.
> 
> That's intentional:
> 
> http://lists.tartarus.org/pipermail/survex/2004-October/000891.html
> 
> Middle button left/right rotates the cave.  Or you can use Ctrl-Left to
> have a combined rotate and tilt.

>From the reaction on the Cambridge expedition this year I know that I am
not alone in finding the new bindings exasperating.  To this end I have
produced a patch which allows one to select the traditional bindings for
current and future Aven sessions.  I hope that will be able to be
incorporated in the near future: unfortunately, despite the fact that
Survex would probably not have such a functional cave viewer if I had
not written Aven in the first place, I cannot now commit any changes to
the source code.

Returning to the point, I have never liked the new bindings, but after
people complaining on expedition I feel even more strongly that they are
an unsatisfactory default.  Specifically:

- You shouldn't have to use both hands to control the cave when you have
  a three-buttoned mouse (at the moment you have to press Control to
  tilt, which I find difficult to do with the hand holding the mouse).
  In the case of mice with fewer buttons, or other limited means of
  control, the existing bindings do nothing to help anyway.

- The middle button on a modern mouse is often something to do with the
  scroll wheel.  Users expect the scroll wheel to move things up and
  down, so on such a mouse it should probably tilt the cave (preferably
  just by moving the wheel, not pressing).  On another note, rotation is
  frequently used and so should be mapped to a proper mouse button,
  rather than pressing a scrollwheel.

- Tilt and rotate (Ctrl+left drag) is a disaster; it rapidly moves the
  cave to bizarre orientations and only serves to cause confusion.
  Caves are usually examined at some particular fixed elevation, so it
  makes no sense to me to combine tilting with any other action.

Most importantly:

- The original scale and rotate mechanism is extremely effective for
  fast navigation of caves.  In my opinion it is one of the things which
  sets apart previous Aven releases from other surveying packages which
  often have segregated controls.  When zooming in on some particular
  passage, it is tedious to have to zoom in with one button, turn the
  cave around a little with another button to move a passage out of the
  way, zoom in a bit more with the previous button, etc.  The
  interactivity and speed with which an accustomed user can navigate to
  a particular point is completely lost with the new bindings.

I can understand that some people have trouble with unwanted movements
introduced during scale/rotate mode, but it seems to me that a more
satisfactory way to address this would be to provide modifier keys to
lock the scaling or the rotation.

Mark