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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Better usage of screen edges and corners?
From:       Malte Cornils <malte () cornils ! net>
Date:       2004-05-06 13:40:12
Message-ID: 200405061540.15445.malte () cornils ! net
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Hello!

I have recently had some problems with kwin. Since mac-style application menus 
have shown to have up a better performance/usability than "standard" ones, I 
tried to use those.

(the reason: to open a pulldown menu, you throw the mouse upwards, hit the 
upper screen edge (no need for slowing down) and pull down the menu, instead 
of locating the menu bar of the specific window, moving there, positioning 
the mouse on the correct spot, and clicking - see linked article).

However, with all styles I used, there is a one-pixel border between mac-style 
menu bar and the screen edge. So, I can move the mouse up quickly to reach 
the menu bar, but have to revert mouse direction, move down approximately one 
pixel again, and *then* click. The file menu is especially bad: you could 
just move the mouse in upper left direction (the fastest possible mouse 
action besides just clicking) and you would have the file menu, but you have 
to move the mouse both down and to the right. 

Is there a way to make the menubar click-sensitive on the screen edge?

Same issue with most window decorations. When I have a konsole window (without 
inner-application border) docked to the left edge of the screen, all 
decorations styles I tried except one from kde-look.org had a left border 
used for resizing the window. So, I can move the mouse quickly to the left 
screen edge, but have to move it some pixels to the right again to move over 
the window decoration before I'm in the app. 

Konsole is not such a good example, double clicking on a specific pixel just 
selects the line. Konqueror in file manager mode has a left sidebar where you 
can easily select sidebar views, this is a better example. Kdevelop has those 
things, too, but in that app, they do not even touch the left edge when 
decorations are switched off, the app has some (unnecessary?) border between 
the clickable area and the window edge itself.

Same thing with scrollbars on the right side: moving the mouse to the right 
screen edge and clicking in the scrollbar to move it is not possible, even 
when there is no decoration border - all the default scrollbars have an at 
least pixel-wide border insensitive to clicks.

You can find a screenshot of the menu and scrollbar issue (well in as much as 
screenshots can show it) on:
http://www.usta.de/RefAk/Aussen/privat/kde_use.png

The article that inspired me:
http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html 

Any ideas?
-Malte

PS: I just tested with a random KDE 3.1.5 installation, the menubar there had 
*no* upper border, though I'm not sure why. The other issues apply here as 
well, though.
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