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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."
I guess I thought this software always came with my distribution. I've been making a certain gesture at the Linux desktop for some time with no effect.
A couple years ago there was a similar app for Windows called Popmouse. I cannnot find it now. Does anyone know what became of that software, or Pointix, the company that made it?
No word yet on what gestures the Linux port of "Leisure Suit Larry" will support.
Thats utterly freakin stupid It takes longer to draw an "N" than it does to click the freakin icon, not to mention that there's probably hundreds of apps that start with the letter "N".
The "mouse gestures" idea is pointless.
This software is allready in Debian, so all you Debian heads, save the author's website, and install with:
# apt-get install wayv
(well, actually sudo aptitude install wayv for me, but that's beside the point)
To me, gestures is a violation of POLA (Principle of least astonishment). When gestures are on in Opera, they get in the way, because I sometimes 'randomly' select text when I browse/read (it helps me read faster, dunno why).
So make me a believer. Tell me _why_ gesturing (as the scourge that it is to me) should haunt me even on my desktop?
No, I'm not trolling, I'm generally curious about why people think this RSI inducing "input method" is useful, and why I should use it instead of my well-optimized keyboard shortcut scheme.
There's already a pretty good mouse gesture program out for Windows called StrokeIt. I tried using it for a while, but it's really not worth it unless you have an optical mouse IME - a balled mouse ended up screwing up the gestures something chronic. Since I got my Logitech optical, it's a bit more usable, but I do wonder how much more efficient it is. To close a window, you have to draw a Q, and in the same time you've done it you could have just clicked the X.
I use the gestures in Phoenix though, moving back and forth between pages is a breeze now though - I really wouldn't recommend it for a full windows system though.
I really hope that the gestures they use are the same as Mozilla's. I use the gestures a lot, and if I'm ever forced to use IE, I find myself gesturing to no avail.
However, I recently tried using Opera which also has gestures capability. The problem I had is that a lot of the gestures are different than Mozilla's gestures, causing me to do Mozilla gestures out of habit without effect (or the wrong effect) inside Opera.
On an operating system level this could be problematic. What if I absent-mindedly do a Mozilla gesture, but in this operating system's gestures, it causes me to lose my work before it was saved? Or some such similar disaster.
Already I know I would have problems with the closing windows by drawing a slash through it. In Mozilla and Opera, you close it by gesturing L, R, L.
Probably the best way to avoid all these gestures getting confused with each other ("now let's see, was that for Opera? Mozilla? or the operating system?") is to develop some sort of gesturing standard that's generally agreed upon as intuitive that we all can remember and use.
Also, what if I have Mozilla installed on a system that also has an operating system gestures program installed? Which gesture takes priority when the same thing means two different things to two different programs that are monitoring the mouse at the same time?
FVWM has supported gestures through LibStoke (apparently what wayV uses as well) for quite some time.
No idea, but StrokeIt sounds similar.
Personally I feel the only gestures worth bothering with is the hold-mousebutton-click-other for navigating back/forward.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Have a look at strokeit
:p
Fairly customizeable, and neat for a while, but eventually I decided that I could do everything more efficiently directly from emacs
I use ratpoison. The only gesture I do is to the mouse, not with the mouse.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
Wonder what gesture he'll use for control-alt-delete?
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Did you ever play "Black & White". It had gestures and once you got used to them they were pretty cool. You would use your mouse to draw the gesture on any surface, and if the game engine successfully recognized it a bright white light would illuminate the path of your mouse (as well as implementing the selected command of course); usually this announced that you (being God in the game) are about to perform a miracle. There was a definite learning curve to using them, but once you got it it was genuinely useful and allowed the game to have almost no interface cluttering the screen. Though it isn't any where near the top of my list of favorite games, the gampeplay was unmistakably innovative.
When I had mouse gestures enabled in my browsers (Mozilla, Opera and Phoenix), I found myself making them by accident and closing the window or something. Maybe they should make them customisable (choose your own gestures - that would be cool and people probably have their own personal gestures they find it is easier/harder for them to make ;-) ) and also make it so one can choose which indivdual gestures you want installed (i.e.: not the kill the app one if your fingers slip sometimes).
If that was done they might be more useful and mainstream (and, maybe, used in many apps and OS's), but still I (like many others, probably) just couldn't be bothered learning all the damn things and they seemed like more pain than they were worth - I know how to user my browser/OS quickly and well by pointing and clicking or by the keyboard, and I do not really need a third harder-to-learn that is of questionable value and unlikely to speed up my browsing or OS use.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
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.
I wrote something similar for BeOS - it's called FourWays. Now the trick is that all BeOS applications use BMessages for communications, and that in conjunction with SpiceyKeys, you can use gestures to control any BeOS application.
Also, theres Cocoa Gestures for MacOS X.
Blimey, it's hard enough training new users to use a mouse. We've all been there:
"No, clicking twice isn't the same as a double click"
"No, you shouldn't move the mouse between the two clicks of a double-click"
etc etc ad nauseum.
Gestures are going to make this even more of a pain...
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.
To all the idiots saying 'this is totally pointless, waste of time' - think about accessibility for a second.
You do realise that there are some people whose only interface with a computer is a head controlled pointer, right?
I hope that the gnome accesibility people consider adopting something like this for gnome2, providing 'gesture-binding' for the desktop.
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.
mouse gestures are a bad idea, Mice are crap interface devices, ever tried drawing with a mouse, it''s like getting my brother to do the washing up.
Now with a graphics tablet as a interface device, gestures are easy(accurate) and fast.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
There's already a gesture recognition program for Win32. Gesture
It's at an early stage at the moment, but shows potential.
I've never used gestures, so I don't know if this is true or not, but I think I remember reading somewhere that gestures tend to exacerbate repetitive stress problems.
Is that true? Or is it just an urban legend?
I've come across software like that in the Windows platform for years, yet I failed to understand how it would improve my everyday interaction with my PC. Of course some people like it and lets face it : it is quite impressive, even 'trendy'. So people will play with it for a few hours and then pretty much forget about it (I know I have). A minority may even continue to use such a system on a regular basis but not me (or anybody I know of for that matter ...).
, http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/pendragon/publication s/programming-overview.html).
;) departments) are spending millions on that area. Sure, they're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart, they aim for profit. But they do offer a few solutions.
... I wonder how many people would agree with that ...
... what if, just if, something happened and I would not be able to use my fingers anymore ? The Gestures-type-of-application (I just can't remember its name !) proved quite useful at that point. Not an adequate replacement of ones fingers but quite usefull nevertheless. Therefore, everytime I see similar software I feel a little more 'secure' and optimistic; it's silly I know ... Thats all.
Yet, for all its 'useless-ness', pointing device based gestures and similar technologies can be of importance for a particular sect of the 'computer users' population : People with disabilities. (check Google on that, and btw here are a couple of quick links http://knowltonian.net/NJIT/webaccessibility.html
I know that my post is on the verge of being moderated 'offtopic' or even 'flamebait' but the truth is that the FS/OSS community has not come up with any serious technologies to aid/help people with disabilities in their effort for satisfactory interaction with their computer. On the other hand, commercial entities/corporations (yes, like Microsoft but also Adobe, Sun etc.; in fact most of the big corps have dedicated research (or marketing
And yes, I am aware of the accessability options provided by modern FS/OSS desktops. But do you think they are enough when compared to commercial solutions ?
It is true that people with disabilities is a very small minority in the FS/OSS world (any statistics anyone ?) so it would not seem wise to 'waste' resources on the development of such software (mouse gestures, visual gesture recognition, voice recognition etc.)
Why did I post this ?
A few years ago I had an accident which resulted into several broken fingers. Ever tried to use a keyboard while most of your fingers are broken or cracked ? I tell you, it's a bitch.
A friend of mine helped me by installing a Gestures kind of software and a trackball in my brand new Win95 (no 'booo' please) box. It didn't solve everything but it did seem to make my interaction easier. My 'torment' only lasted a month or so but since then I often wondered
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.
I've been gesturing at Windoze for years. The symbols are mostly undocumented because they are unsuitable for children.
Black & White had this
Gesturing is hard
You can do this with StrokeMe, libstroke, and XYZ (name software here)
Ha! I've captured all the comments with only 3 lines!
Seriously though, I think this is wayCool (ducks as piano flies over head, nearly hits. Or did it nearly miss?)
I loves the black&white gestures (They should make it draw the gesture on the screen with you, a la Black&White)
I've got nothing more to say to this.
My other