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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 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.