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tcepsaOh AutoHotKey, is there anything you can't do?
My capslock key is now a middle mouse button and I have smooth scrolling whenever I want it despite my two-button trackball. All it took was Capslock::MButton.
UI tweaks FTW! ^_^
When I first found out about 3-button mice, and that the middle button often caused it to go into smooth scrolling mode, my first thought was something between "Well that's annoying!" and "Meh?" It never seemed to respond the way I wanted, I didn't have a 3-button mouse at home so I couldn't really use it, and mice whose scroll-wheels also acted as middle-buttons were just really annoying, because it's a pain in the butt to keep it from scrolling while you're trying to click.
Besides, I have a perfectly good set of arrow keys right here and, failing that, there's a scroll bar. With arrows if I don't want to scroll very far.
That worked out for me just fine for several years. However, for some reason (quite possibly the rise of the touch display) I have in about the last two weeks become painfully aware of just how cognitively unfriendly those methods are. The arrow keys, for example, tend to move things line by line, or possibly even a couple of lines at a time. This makes sense; they're toggle buttons and are either off or on, so the easiest thing to do is "when you get this keycode, move the text by a line." There's no way to modulate the speed they go at, so they have to go fairly fast (which is compensated by the fact that they only go so far each time you press them so you know approximately what you're going to get). Unfortunately, when that happens, everything is shifted and your eyes have to take time to seek out the location where they had been (this is especially egregious in things that don't actually move by a line of text--web browsers, I'm looking at you--but instead by some fixed amount of pixels, so you might end up with another line and a half of text, or two-and-a-third new lines of text). It's a small break, it takes a fraction of a second, but it is still an interruption and is, I believe, deleterious to maintaining flow.
The arrows on scroll bars are in some ways better and in some ways worse. When you click one, it usually moves things by a pixel or two, much easier for your eyes to follow. But it does it so slowly that you have to click several times, or hold down the arrow. That does scroll pretty smoothly in most cases, but you're still limited to one speed--and usually it's a speed that's too fast to actually read at, but too slow to get anywhere quickly.
Next, the scroll bar itself. This is good for getting around quickly... sort of. It is good because you move the mouse and the page moves in accordance with the speed at which you moved the mouse. However, it is bad because this is proportional not only to the speed at which you moved the mouse but also to the amount of content on the screen at one time versus the amount of overall content in the document/image/thing being viewed. If you have two screenfuls of text, you can move the mouse pretty quickly and not get terribly lost; it generally moves slowly enough that you can keep track of where you are, even if you're slinging the mouse around at a decent clip. (I have just demonstrated this to myself in the textbox for this journal entry ^_^) However, if you have, say, hundreds of pages of text--PDF's, I'm looking at you--then the scrollbar handle becomes very hard to grab on to and if you even move it a couple of pixels you could end up several pages away from where you had just been, and they've gone by so fast that you are now completely lost. So it's great for moving around quickly, but tremendously poor for getting anywhere specific.
Finally, paging (pgup, pgdn, and clicking in the scrollbar somewhere that's neither the arrow or the handle). This is another blessing and curse, and is largely subject to the same complaints as the arrow keys: it moves by a fixed amount, but usually the amount by which it moves is suboptimal. Again, trying it in my browser text area for this journal entry, I find the results to be frustratingly arbitrary: if I click in the scrollbar area to move the page down, the bottom line becomes the top line. That's annoying because if I'm paging, my brain really wants to assume that the new top line would be the one following the previous bottom line, so it's another little hiccup where I go "Oh, no, wait, I already read that, hang on, is there anything else I've already read on this 'new' page? No, okay, moving along..." Even worse, if I use the page down key, the bottom two lines become the top two lines (WTF?!) The only really good use I have found for paging is in PDFs (so they do have some redeeming qualities ~grin~) when I'm viewing them in one-full-page-at-a-time mode, and then it actually flips me to the next page.
Against this context, smooth scrolling looks like maybe it's not such a bad plan after all--especially now that I've remapped that capslock key and turned it from a liability into an asset.(Seriously, does anybody actually use capslock other than by accident or to yell at people on the Internet? If you want to yell at someone on the Internet, you should have to make the effort to hold down the shift key while you do it.) Just press a key, move your mouse a little, and away it goes. If you don't move your mouse too far, it'll go at a speed that you can keep an eye on it and watch for the place you want to get off. If you want to go a little faster, it's easy to change speeds so you can slow down and check whether you're close to where you want to be. I especially like it for reading long things (like LJ) because I can set it to scroll at about the same rate that I read, so I no longer have to do much manipulation at all beyond that initial setup. Sure, I have to tweak it now and then if I want to spend more or less time on something or I have to look away, but so far it still seems very preferable to having to re-find my place every time I get to the bottom of the screen.
I'll probably try to put up a follow up post in a few days/weeks/months to confirm/retract this entry as I get more usage, but for now, yay smooth scrolling!
My capslock key is now a middle mouse button and I have smooth scrolling whenever I want it despite my two-button trackball. All it took was Capslock::MButton.
UI tweaks FTW! ^_^
When I first found out about 3-button mice, and that the middle button often caused it to go into smooth scrolling mode, my first thought was something between "Well that's annoying!" and "Meh?" It never seemed to respond the way I wanted, I didn't have a 3-button mouse at home so I couldn't really use it, and mice whose scroll-wheels also acted as middle-buttons were just really annoying, because it's a pain in the butt to keep it from scrolling while you're trying to click.
Besides, I have a perfectly good set of arrow keys right here and, failing that, there's a scroll bar. With arrows if I don't want to scroll very far.
That worked out for me just fine for several years. However, for some reason (quite possibly the rise of the touch display) I have in about the last two weeks become painfully aware of just how cognitively unfriendly those methods are. The arrow keys, for example, tend to move things line by line, or possibly even a couple of lines at a time. This makes sense; they're toggle buttons and are either off or on, so the easiest thing to do is "when you get this keycode, move the text by a line." There's no way to modulate the speed they go at, so they have to go fairly fast (which is compensated by the fact that they only go so far each time you press them so you know approximately what you're going to get). Unfortunately, when that happens, everything is shifted and your eyes have to take time to seek out the location where they had been (this is especially egregious in things that don't actually move by a line of text--web browsers, I'm looking at you--but instead by some fixed amount of pixels, so you might end up with another line and a half of text, or two-and-a-third new lines of text). It's a small break, it takes a fraction of a second, but it is still an interruption and is, I believe, deleterious to maintaining flow.
The arrows on scroll bars are in some ways better and in some ways worse. When you click one, it usually moves things by a pixel or two, much easier for your eyes to follow. But it does it so slowly that you have to click several times, or hold down the arrow. That does scroll pretty smoothly in most cases, but you're still limited to one speed--and usually it's a speed that's too fast to actually read at, but too slow to get anywhere quickly.
Next, the scroll bar itself. This is good for getting around quickly... sort of. It is good because you move the mouse and the page moves in accordance with the speed at which you moved the mouse. However, it is bad because this is proportional not only to the speed at which you moved the mouse but also to the amount of content on the screen at one time versus the amount of overall content in the document/image/thing being viewed. If you have two screenfuls of text, you can move the mouse pretty quickly and not get terribly lost; it generally moves slowly enough that you can keep track of where you are, even if you're slinging the mouse around at a decent clip. (I have just demonstrated this to myself in the textbox for this journal entry ^_^) However, if you have, say, hundreds of pages of text--PDF's, I'm looking at you--then the scrollbar handle becomes very hard to grab on to and if you even move it a couple of pixels you could end up several pages away from where you had just been, and they've gone by so fast that you are now completely lost. So it's great for moving around quickly, but tremendously poor for getting anywhere specific.
Finally, paging (pgup, pgdn, and clicking in the scrollbar somewhere that's neither the arrow or the handle). This is another blessing and curse, and is largely subject to the same complaints as the arrow keys: it moves by a fixed amount, but usually the amount by which it moves is suboptimal. Again, trying it in my browser text area for this journal entry, I find the results to be frustratingly arbitrary: if I click in the scrollbar area to move the page down, the bottom line becomes the top line. That's annoying because if I'm paging, my brain really wants to assume that the new top line would be the one following the previous bottom line, so it's another little hiccup where I go "Oh, no, wait, I already read that, hang on, is there anything else I've already read on this 'new' page? No, okay, moving along..." Even worse, if I use the page down key, the bottom two lines become the top two lines (WTF?!) The only really good use I have found for paging is in PDFs (so they do have some redeeming qualities ~grin~) when I'm viewing them in one-full-page-at-a-time mode, and then it actually flips me to the next page.
Against this context, smooth scrolling looks like maybe it's not such a bad plan after all--especially now that I've remapped that capslock key and turned it from a liability into an asset.(Seriously, does anybody actually use capslock other than by accident or to yell at people on the Internet? If you want to yell at someone on the Internet, you should have to make the effort to hold down the shift key while you do it.) Just press a key, move your mouse a little, and away it goes. If you don't move your mouse too far, it'll go at a speed that you can keep an eye on it and watch for the place you want to get off. If you want to go a little faster, it's easy to change speeds so you can slow down and check whether you're close to where you want to be. I especially like it for reading long things (like LJ) because I can set it to scroll at about the same rate that I read, so I no longer have to do much manipulation at all beyond that initial setup. Sure, I have to tweak it now and then if I want to spend more or less time on something or I have to look away, but so far it still seems very preferable to having to re-find my place every time I get to the bottom of the screen.
I'll probably try to put up a follow up post in a few days/weeks/months to confirm/retract this entry as I get more usage, but for now, yay smooth scrolling!
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