Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!mtunx!rutgers!njin!princeton!udel!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!steinmetz!uunet!mcvax!guido
From: guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Automatic mouse cursor movement
Message-ID: <349@piring.cwi.nl>
Date: 7 Jun 88 09:37:02 GMT
References: <10799@apple.Apple.Com> <10700006@hpfclp.SDE.HP.COM> <5034@june.cs.washington.edu> <11088@steinmetz.ge.com> <4964@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> <13091@jumbo.dec.com>
Reply-To: guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum)
Organization: The Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Amoebae
Lines: 24

[I've redirected this to xpert/comp.windows.x from comp.windows.misc]

In article <13091@jumbo.dec.com> jg@jumbo.UUCP (Jim Gettys) writes:
>I certainly heartily agree that "warping" the pointer is a VERY bad idea.
>[...]
>And therefore in line with X's mechanism orientation, X provides the
>capability.  So as usual, X provides the length of rope to hang yourself.

Not quite.  A modification that would seem to be very useful is to
*offset* the pointer by a certain distance rather than moving it to an
absolute position (in a window).  This was mentioned in the example of
the pie menu near the window border.  I believe that X11's solution of
specifying an origin region is not enough to emulate such a relative
warp.

I also agree that pointer warps are bad, and in fact they form one of
the more annoying features of my otherwise favourite window manager,
twm.  (Maybe a more ovbvious DANGER sign should be added to the
description of XWarpPointer -- obviously not all readers of the Xlib
documentation are also skilled in human factors.)

--
Guido van Rossum, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam
guido@piring.cwi.nl or mcvax!piring!guido or guido%piring.cwi.nl@uunet.uu.net