Hi, yesterday I added a new "Experimental" page to the config dialog of the Folder View desktop containment in master. It offers two options that enable a different way of interacting with widgets on the desktop:
- Pressing and holding for $platform_delay to engage a 'move' mode where as long as the press is kept, the applet moves with the pointer. - Optionally, reveal the handle on press-and-hold as well. This is of course technically necessary (without the handle you can't resize or rotate), but I intentionally made it a separate option because the current handle design is not the only possibility once you go modal like this, and this allows getting a feel for how things are without the handle bar we're used to. I encourage you to enable this mode (both with and without the optional handle reveal) and play with it for a day or so. My original assumption was that press-and-hold would be unintuitive and cumbersome (although platforms like Android use it as well), but in practice I find it makes the desktop feel simpler and less hyper- active. A separate concern is that "you need to hold" interaction patterns are usually an accessibility concern - but this is the case for drag-by-handle, too, and a modal design would make it easier to add keyboard controls to move applets or other a11n approaches. Additionally, the implementation currently intentionally ignores whether widgets are locked or not. With no handles flying in on hover, and move/edit mode being hard to enable accidentally, the lock itself becomes much less necessary - maybe altogether super- fluous even, allowing for further simplification. Some implementation notes: * Engaging move/edit mode by press-and-hold asks everything in the applet to abort mouse interaction and ungrab. This can be caught in applet code via the onCanceled handlers in MouseArea and (also new as of yesterday, added by me) and MouseEventListener - most applet code actually needs no changes, but e.g. Folder View itself (when used as widget) needs to do things like potentially cancel rubber band selection mode, similar as if a release event were to happen. * A press-and-hold will only engage move/edit mode if the cursor stays within the drag distance. That means if you press-and-hold and move around more than a few px - say to do rubber band selection or use a pen tool - that won't be interfered with. This coarse check seems to work well in practice; even taking a long time to select individual letters in note widgets is no problem here. Known issues: * The placeholder (common to Desktop and FV) sizing with handle reveal disabled is wrong by the handle width. * This impl is a prototype, don't expect polish. I'm not really sure what all of this means yet (although Netrunner intends to ship some form of this eventually), but it's food for thought. Cheers, Eike _______________________________________________ Plasma-devel mailing list Plasma-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
