Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!autodesk!peb From: peb@Autodesk.COM (Paul Baclaski) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: NOT (click to type) in NeXTStep? Summary: click to type is the QWERTY of window systems Message-ID: <350@autodesk.COM> Date: 5 Nov 90 22:06:52 GMT References: <1990Oct28.165341.6949@cs.cmu.edu> Organization: Autodesk Inc., Sausalito CA, USA Lines: 42 In article , fox@allegra.att.com (David Fox) writes: > ... Even the Amiga window system can be configured > so there is no need to click on applications to direct the input > stream to them. This is a very disturbing revelation for someone > like me who has been thinking of buying a NeXT machine. Actually, on the Amiga, moonmouse (aka sunmouse) does not work perfectly because all it does is interpose a click whenever the mouse moves into a new window. This causes problems with editors that use the same mouse click to move the cursor, for instance, so you move the mouse back to the editor and the cursor jumps to a random spot. Click-to-type is the QWERTY of window systems. The worst case senario is when you use 2 machines, one at work with real estate mode (Gosling's term for non-click-to-type) and one at home with click-to-type: it causes many errors on both machines because you can easily forget what machine you are on. >From: jmann@angmar.sw.stratus.com (Jim Mann @ Stratus Computer, Inc.) >One of the reasons I like my NeXT so much is that they DID >build on reflexes many of us had developed from the micros we'd worked >on: click to type, single click to select, double click to activate, drag >over to select a region and so forth. I find Sun to be the odd machine out. Hey, what about us early users of window interfaces who have been using Suns for years (6 for me). We have reflexes too! >From: smb3u@mendel.acc.Virginia.EDU (Steven M. Boker @ University of Virginia) >There is a method to all of this madness. First of all have you guys from >X land ever moved your cursor across a crowded screen when your ram was all >occupied with high priority tasks? Thats why I end up setting click to type >even in X. Sun solved this problem by having a 200 millisecond no-motion filter on the mouse: your mouse must stop before the window is activated, so spurious activations do not occur. Sun supports click-to-type too, in sunview and xview, BTW. Paul E. Baclaski peb@autodesk.com