Friday 27 June 2014

scrolling the sidebar with the scroll-wheel

The sidebar comes with a vertical scrollbar for when content doesn't fit in the available space. But the mouse pointer has to be right over the scrollbar to use your scroll wheel, it doesn't work to hover over the content of the sidebar and move the wheel there.

Which is annoying, but on trying to fix that I realized the snag with allowing the wheel-scroll over the sidebar. If you scroll the sidebar down and a widget contained in it ends up under the mouse pointer then if it is a widget which accepts the wheel-scroll it's very easy to accidentally make a change to the widget that has scrolled under the mouse pointer. Spin Buttons for example.

As an aside, this is the exact same problem that I have in glade where I scroll down the property pane with the scroll-wheel and accidentally end up over the "Ellipsize" listbox and inadvertently change it from None to Middle. So if you find labels in LibreOffice with "..." in the middle of them for no good reason, this is why.

Anyway, I still want to scroll the sidebar, but I don't want to end up with this conflicting target-location widget wheel-scroll conflict, so my solution is to continue to send the wheel-scroll events to the previous target so long as the position of the mouse pointer is at the same place as the last wheel event and the time between events is <= the default timeout for raising help tips, i.e. 1/2 a second.

Seems to work well for me, scrolling the sidebars "just works" on master (LibreOffice 4.4) with the scroll wheel without random changes to any scroll-wheel sensitive contents but you can still use the scroll-wheel to modify those widgets on moving to them or when the little timeout completes.

No comments:

Post a Comment