Mouse Gestures in Mozilla

Jedbro writes: "I have really enjoyed the mouse gestures in Opera since its release, since then I have come across an awesome new project at Mozdev, called OptiMoz. OptiMoz (a.k.a. MozGest) is a XPI for Mozilla allowing Mouse Gestures to be available. It works great with Mozilla 0.9.4 and nightly builds. It currently has Gestures for: *New Tab Window (Moz Tabs!!) *Forward in History *Backward in History *Reload *New Document *Up a directory in the URL *View Source *View Cookies for Current Domain *View Meta Data for Domain and *Access Homepage."

Comments

Sensiva

[metlin]

Sensiva is a nice tool for mouse gesturing, prety efficient too.

Esp. useful for keyboard-repellant people =)

Re:Gimic

[Xenex]

You've never used the gestures in Opera for more then a few seconds, have you? Once you get used to them, you'll swear by them.

A quick set of down-up's on a bunch of links on a news site, and they're all loading in new windows in the background.

Down-Right, and a window closes.

Down, in new window in the forground.

Up-Down, refresh.

This is really only scraching the surface, but they are the ones I personally use.

With these gestures, I can browse the web with literally only the mouse, and still use it as easily as if I had access to keyboard shortcuts.

Sure, it's not for everyone, and I'm still split 50/50 between my usage of keyboard commands and gestures, but don't call something a gimmic just because YOU don't like it.

Re:Am I doing something wrong?

[mattdm]

This isn't part of the main mozilla project. See the optimoz install page.

Re:Didn't work for me

[brunes69]

Also, from the experience I've had, the user you're running mozilla under has to be able to write to the mozilla directory to install plugins. So I su root, install the plugin, then re-start in user mode. The plugin then appears.

Re:XPI?

[knarf]

XPI ('Zippy') is mozilla lingo for 'Cross Platform Installer' or something like that. XPI files are to mozilla what deb files are to Debian, or RPM's to RedHat. They are actually jar files (you know, Java Archives, which in turn are really zip-files with a twist) with an install script and a description of the contents of the archive in RDF format. More on this can be found on the mozilla website

Re:how about additional mouse buttons ?

[abischof]

In IE the 4th button is the Page back feature .. this is WAY more convinient than every possible guesture, just press ur thumb , and page back.

That specific functionality is bug 30431. Feel free to vote for it if that issue is important to you. In the meantime, there are still ways in which you can make use of those extra buttons:

1. First, configure at least one of the side-buttons to Ctrl
2. Then, goto Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Mouse Wheel.
3. Select "Ctrl" from the pull-down and set the radio button to "Move back and forward in the browsing history".

Now, to move back or forward, just hold down the side-button that you configured to Ctrl and move the mouse wheel. Ok, so it's not as nice as just a click, but at least it's something until bug 30431 is fixed.

Can Slashdot help them stop adding features?

[Tony Shepps]

I'm just about at the end of my wick over certain mozilla bugs, such as the myriad problems with cursor management in textareas. Over the last six months to a year, I swear Moz has moved backwards in getting rid of these kinds of piddling little problems - problems which, in my opinion, absolutely prevent its wider acceptance.

The usual reply is that you can't prevent people from working on what they want to work on. Well guess what, if the piddling little bugs aren't fixed, there won't BE an open source browser for you to add your favorite little quirks to.

I'm composing this in Moz and if I hit the right arrow button at the end of a line, the cursor will go to the top of the text area. If I hit the down arrow key, it will create a hidden EOL. Sometimes entire lines of text just disappear and then re-appear. Sometimes unhighlighted text remains highlighted. Once in a while it even crashes, which I like because then at least something has a chance of getting attention.

It's so bush, too, that's the problem with it. Looks like Moz can manage to claim compatibility with important WWW standards but CAN'T MANAGE STANDARD TEXT EDITING.

You can complain about me complaining, but my contribution is not coding, and all my words are out of frustration for seeing these stupid little bugs live on for month after month. To live to make it into milestone after milestone. And the worst part is, IT USED TO WORK PERFECTLY. At some point, probably last spring, text editing was BROKEN. WTF, people?

And I won't even mention how many times the window focus problems have changed but not improved in the last six months. And to think that, a year ago, I though Moz was three months away from "ready".

A list of gestures in Opera...

[antdude]

You can view the list here. This is for Windows version and I was using Opera v5.12. This is sweet! I can't wait to use this with Mozilla and Galeon. :)

Re:Didn't work for me

[mddevice]

I had the same problem until I downloaded a previous version of the install.js from cvs. Now it works just fine.