View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | View Status | Date Submitted | Last Update |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0008589 | ardour | features | public | 2021-02-26 10:45 | 2022-02-18 03:32 |
| Reporter | unfa | Assigned To | |||
| Priority | normal | Severity | minor | Reproducibility | have not tried |
| Status | new | Resolution | open | ||
| Summary | 0008589: Allow panning the timeline in X/Y using middle mouse button | ||||
| Description | In many programs that feature any form of canvas, the middle mouse button can be held down on empty space to pan the canvas. I think Ardour would also benefit from such a feature. How would it work: When the user hold down MMB while not hovering over any region, the horizontal mouse movement translates to panning the timeline horizontally. The vertical movement has a dead zone and some increment before it shifts the view vertically, to avoid crazy track scrolling. On conjunction with the mouse wheel zoom this would greatly improve user's options of quickly navigating the timeline. Alternatively, a modifier key could be used to alter MMB's function to allow using pan even if the mouse is hovering over an object, as that'd be much less error-prone, Though I'd personally use panning much more often, so it'd make more sense to me to have pan be default, and moving regions vertically require a modifier key (Shift for example). What do you think? | ||||
| Tags | ui, usability, UX | ||||
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tl;dr: Configure your OS or Hardware to do that. Thinkpads do this unconditionally. Mac Systems likewise offer X/Y scrolling OOTB via magic-mouse or their touchpad. This is not something application developers should do. Efficient use it depends on the mouse or interface you have. Furthermore there are additional preferences (natural scrolling), or with some multi-button trackballs you may prefer buttons other than middle-click. |
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I agree with the original poster. Navigating the canvas with come combination of middle-mouse and a key (personally `ctrl+mmb`) becomes natural for anyone who uses 2D or 3D graphics/cad programs. It should be more than one to one mouse movement to canvas movement (1.5 or 3) particularly in the x direction, might make sense for y to be a lower amount though. I find myself trying desperately to drag around before I end up zooming in and out a bunch just to move over a bit. On windows a different method of interaction that fulfills the same function would probably be covered by the standard middle-mouse-click action but on other platforms this would be a good feature. |
