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Gestures For The Linux Desktop
geoffsmith writes "Just stumbled upon a gesture system for the linux desktop called 'wayV'. It works similarly to Mozilla gestures, except at windowing system level. For example, hold down the middle mouse button and draw an 'N' and netscape pops up, or draw a slash through a window and it kills the window's process. There are .debs available and the author is currently porting it to win32."
Yes, like in Opera.
The reason I see those as the most useful is because you typically do them while "off keyboard". If I open a new window it's very likely that I'm going to have to type something into it anyway, so opening the window using a guesture instead of pressing ctrl+n isn't a big win if you measure in "minimizing movement" which seems to be my optimization critera.
A case can be made for other functions in the same way -- reload certainly is "off keyboard", but I still hit F5 or click the reload-button, probably becase I'm so very used to it in conjunction with the relative rareness of that operation (as compared to navigation)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Conversely, I'm disappointed that gnome2 in its effort to make it appeal to windows users has dumbed things down a lot. After all, once you get users to try out the linux desktop, how do you keep them? By making the desktop more powerful, of course.
I'm looking forward to seeing this get adopted widely. Eventually, I want there to be an entire layer that looks at your both keystrokes and your mouse movements before passing it on to the application. That way, handwriting recognition would work for all applications (wayV does this somewhat). Also, I could define app-independent "macros". For instance, I could set up some mouse gesture to translate into typing, say, my name or the URL of my home page.
PC game came out about 2 years ago called Black and White, the main way to cast spells in this game was through gestures. By about the second island I would have killed for icons or something to click. Many times I would be trying to create a rain spell to stop my village from being on fire, all along repeatedly failing the casting because I couldn't get the stupid gesture just right. So I'll pass on gestures for anything else.
It sounds really cool and all, and I've tried it out it Opera, but I always find myself back on the keyboard. Yeah, I hated Black and White, too.
YMMV obviously, but when I'm at the computer, I'm normally using both hands to type and taking them off the keyboard to perform a fairly precise action with the mouse is a pita.
Icons are actually fairly forgiving. You usually have around a 32x32 area of screen to hit your target. It seems like if you vary more than that in the gestures, then the gesture fails. And since you can increase your icon size, you can increase the allowable area for the doubleclick.
And as others point out, in both windows and linux you can easily make key combinations to launch an app. Although I find myself using both os's autocomplete function in the run command. Type in a command once, then it's a simple win+r or alt+f2 to bring up the run box and type the first letter or two of the app's name to run it. Much faster for me than taking my hands off the keyboard, moving to the mouse and making a gesture.
I don't understand, why gestures are so popular. I tried Mozilla gestures once, but run into problems with them. At first, they seemed to be a great help, but eventually they just started to make my life difficult. For example, when I tried to paint a piece of text by dragging mouse from right to left, the gesture system decided that I wanted to go to the previous page. Well, that's just stupid. And if I remember correctly, it doesn't help to drag mouse from left to right while painting a section, because it assumes that I want to move forward a page. For me, this kind of a system just makes life harder.