On Fri, Jun 21, 2002 at 12:30:51PM -0700, Mel Seder wrote:
Does anyone know of a user interface that brings the action to where your mouse is sitting. Instead of taking me off to the side somewhere and forcing me to move the mouse cursor to the question, let the question come to where my mouse cursor is. Don't force us users to waltz that mouse across our desks all day long.
That will become a big boost in productivity I think.
After reading some articles about interface design, I started placing all my mousable items along the top and right hand side of my screen (I'm right handed) since those are the areas that are easiest to get to with the flick of my wrist. I find that in order to do this inside apps, it's often necessary to run the configurator for the associated library's desktop environment.
On top of that, I set myself up a bunch of hotkeys for frequently used mouse actions so that I don't have to move my hands off the keyboard to get what I want (when I'd typing)
One of my nicer setups (that was pretty hardcore command line though) was just running fvwm, no applets, pager pages selected by the corresponding Ctrl-Shift-keypad# (as far as I'm concerned this should be a standard set of hotkeys) focus on mouseover, and each page filled with xterms of differing dimensions (or some with xterms dedicated to specific purposes). I also had a page with a browser and another where xmms had been slipped in, and one left empty for whatever-I-felt-like. Also, when using the xterms (most of the time) I just kept the mouse in the centre of the screen so i never had to move the mouse more than a couple of mm in order to move focus between windows.
Of course, at home, I use GNOME since my gf likes to use my machine from time to time, doesn't want to have to log in herself, and gets frustrated/intimidated by endless screens full of xterms.