Mouse and Touchpad

Common mouse and touchpad settings.

Participants

AllanDay

Goals

Common settings for mice and touchpads, including:

  • Left/right primary button
  • Mouse
    • Speed
    • Natural scrolling on/off
  • Touchpad
    • On/off
    • Speed
    • Clicking: touch anywhere, touchpad areas (incorporate tap to click?)
    • Scrolling: edge/two-finger/none
    • Natural scrolling on/off

Effectively communicate how each of these options work, particularly those that people might not be familiar with, like natural scrolling, two-finger scrolling, secondary tap.

Help people to learn about the various multi-touch gestures that are available.

Allow people to test their settings?

Relevant Art

Windows

Windows screenshot

Windows screenshot

Windows screenshot

Windows screenshot

OS X

OS X screenshot

ElementaryOS

http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2011/243/7/3/mouse_and_touchpad_plug_by_danrabbit-d479h09.png

Chrome OS

Chrome OS screenshot

Discussion

Touch settings (for gestures and the like) could go in a separate panel.

I think the gnome desktop should get rid of the double click behaviour, or at the very least, make it a non-default option. Currently https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121113 prevent this to happen. Interestingly xfce seems to manage it now, according to http://blog.xfce.org/

Mixing single and double click management is even worst than having no single click at all, users get confused because they can't understand why one click is sometime enough, and sometime not.

Also note that if we want gnome to be tablet-ready, double click is really impractical.

Tentative Design

https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Design/settings-mockups/raw/master/mouse-and-touchpad/mouse-and-touchpad.png

Comments

The "primary button" choice formulation is great. Nice job.

You should add a "Enable double click to perform default action" checkbox, or eventually a "Perform default action on : (*) single click / ( ) double click" radio button.

Don't forget about ThinkPad users with TrackPoint. It should work out of the box, including both vertical and horizontal scrolling (moving trackpoint whith middle-button pressed).

The "Test your setting" frame may contain actual elements, that the user may encounter while using real interfaces. It should also be a zone to test selection, and any generic action the user may perform using the mouse/touchpad. Here is the list of action that this zone should enable to test which comme to my mind : * perform default action on a directory/file * (de)selecting items (ie. files in nautilus or any gtk*list), including muli-selection (more bellow on this topic) * navigating a window menu * displaying and navigating the contextual menu * selecting text

What about an option like "Disable touchpad when mouse is attached"? I find it really useful on laptops.

Bug 121113 - File chooser requires double clicking brings some thought material on the topic.

See Also

Design/SystemSettings/Mouse (last edited 2019-09-02 09:17:04 by AllanDay)