Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!watson.ibm.COM!dan
From: dan@watson.ibm.COM (Walt Daniels)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Double clicks
Message-ID: <101989.155135.dan@watson.ibm.com>
Date: 19 Oct 89 19:51:35 GMT
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 35

Although the history of double clicks is interesting it is not germain
to changing the environment from a single machine to the network
situation of today.  If one really wants a powerful mouse, why not go
back to Doug Englebart's original mouse which had enough keys to use
as a typewriter by exploiting cords.  I don't remember if it used
double clicks or not.

In a network environment one must reinvestigate the usefulness of
all the user interaction paradigms since the timing changes
dramatically.  It is not even so much the absolute value of the time
between events as their potential variability.  I will trade all sorts
of things for consistent performance (after all that is a large part
of the reason for the success of pc's and workstations over
mainframes.)

Even simple things like keyboard typeahead are very hard to support in
a windowing environment.  I frequently switch between a host session
in a window and other applications which are designed to exploit X.
Most of my host work fully supports typeahead (and I need it because
the response time is slower than my typing speed.)  In X, some
applications support type ahead and other do not which makes it very
hard to anticipate.  Xterm supports typeahead; vi supports typeahead
(because it is really tty based); but my favorite editor which trys to
exploit the advantages of windows does not support typeahead fully.
Once the window is up and ready, I can type ahead but if I start
typing while the file is still be read and no window is present, those
key strokes wind up in the xterm from which I invoked the editor until
some variable magic point.  So for small local files I usually get
away with typeahead and for remote or large files I wind up twisted in
knots.  Variability is intolerable.  Perhaps some X guru can tell me
how to fix my editor to get all the keys but I suspect it is hard or
impossible since there is certainly a period of time between the
invocation and the call to Xcreatewindow.
Walt Daniels
IBM Research