Bug 163121 - Initiate effects by pressing left and right mousebutton at the same time <-- especially "Present-Windows" --> enhanced mousebuttons
Summary: Initiate effects by pressing left and right mousebutton at the same time <-- ...
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: kwin
Classification: Plasma
Component: general (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Platform: Compiled Sources Linux
: NOR wishlist
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: KWin default assignee
URL:
Keywords:
: 182183 182658 185747 186804 207845 237740 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2008-06-03 11:43 UTC by patrick.schwalm
Modified: 2020-03-03 21:29 UTC (History)
11 users (show)

See Also:
Latest Commit:
Version Fixed In:


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Description patrick.schwalm 2008-06-03 11:43:15 UTC
Version:            (using Devel)
Installed from:    Compiled sources

Hi,

I think that it would be very useful to have a "mouse-shortcut" to initiiate the "Present-Windows" effect.

I think that "present windows" is an effect that aims to be used by mouse, so it would be nice to have different, fast, ways to initiiate the effect.

I know that it can be initiiatet by a window corner, but I think that a direct click is more effective than moving the mouse a "long way" to a screen corner.

So, conclusion:
Ability to configure "mice shortcuts" for some effect... or maybe everywhere in kwin
Comment 1 Aldoo 2008-06-26 17:19:42 UTC
That could be solved as an after effect of fixing the "new" bug #34362 (and also fixing #48062 could be interesting for other effects, like the zoom).
Comment 2 Martin Flöser 2009-01-28 19:53:17 UTC
*** Bug 182183 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 3 Scott Martin 2009-02-01 03:04:47 UTC
*** Bug 182658 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 4 Scott Martin 2009-02-01 03:05:47 UTC
Copied from the dupe, above: 

A Compiz-alike wish... I would like it to be possible to activate the cube by middle (Button3)-clicking the desktop. That way you can spin the cube using only the mouse. 
Comment 5 Stephan Sokolow 2009-02-11 01:37:10 UTC
If you implement support for this, please allow binding effects to buttons of arbitrary number.

My mouse has 5 buttons and only the gestures system would allow me to bind to buttons 4 and 5 in KDE 3. (And since I wanted it for my drawing tablet, that wasn't a big help)

My wacom tablet has buttons 1-3 on the stylus and 9-12 on the tablet itself and not even the gestures system would let me bind buttons 9-12 in KDE 3.
Comment 6 lucas 2009-02-28 04:12:20 UTC
*** Bug 185747 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 7 Martin Flöser 2009-03-10 18:54:08 UTC
*** Bug 186804 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 8 Sam Baumhaus 2009-03-14 01:10:38 UTC
I think adding support for mouse buttons in general would be a great thing to do. There are just some effects that are easier to activate/handle by using a mouse rather then using some keyboard bindings (the cube thing has been mentioned already)

I hope this will be implemented some day. Using your mouse buttons to activate something is a "must have".
Comment 9 Sam Baumhaus 2009-03-14 01:11:56 UTC
*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***
Comment 10 Juan Garcia 2009-07-25 18:47:20 UTC
I think this can increase notably usability and productivity.
Imagine just pressing a mouse button to activate Present Windows.
And just another one to activate the Cover Switch.
And maybe the combination of a key and the mouse scroll to zoom in and zoom out.

It would make a big difference in usability, so I vote for it.
Comment 11 Martin Flöser 2009-09-19 09:34:18 UTC
*** Bug 207845 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 12 Martin Flöser 2010-05-16 13:21:31 UTC
*** Bug 237740 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 13 Juan Garcia 2010-06-04 22:49:12 UTC
I would like to remind about this bug or feature request.
If simultaneous right and left button mouse click is not feasible for triggering an effect how about the middle mouse button?
Versions of KDE4 are arriving implementing fancy features but still forgetting that usability features for users like this one make much of a bigger difference in usability than most of the fancy effects added lately.
Comment 14 JeanpPhilippe Robichaud 2010-11-30 22:10:11 UTC
I'd like to chime in, like Juan Garcia: this is an old request, still valid over the age.  

After over two years, this seems to be still under the radar of kde devs...

What can we do to raise the visibility of this feature request?  It would increase the usability of kde quite a bit...
Comment 15 Thomas Lübking 2010-11-30 22:45:58 UTC
My 3¢

a) lmb+rmb is no "usability advance" since it's possible but incredibly hard to do that (the timeframe is somewhat < 40ms ...) -> no usability advance at all
b) the mmb is not an option at all, since other than on windows it's traditionally used for X11's clipboard (by default) and other operations, ie. it's generally taken by clients.
c) clicking the desktop with how many buttons or modifiers ever would actually not be too hard, kwin effects just could add dbus interfaces being called by plasma -or other clients- on mouseclick events (kwin cannot intercept them at all since it doesn't know whether the click should maybe go to some plasmoid)

In general afair mouseevents were supposed to become a KAction feature and should than (implicitly) be available for any kwin shortcuts as well.
Comment 16 JeanpPhilippe Robichaud 2010-12-01 03:25:03 UTC
Thanks Thomas, that's good to know.

Any idea "when" mouse events will become KActions? 4.6? 4.7?

Again thanks.

I'm currently using 4.5 and it seems that the trick describe here https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=106494 doesn't work anymore. The idea describe here is to send a dbus event when certain key bindings are found (using xbindkeys).  That would be easy to do, but somehow, when I try to run :
qdbus org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/kwin invokeShortcut "view_zoom_in"
I get:
Cannot find '.invokeShortcut' in object /component/kwin at org.kde.kglobalaccel
Comment 17 Thomas Lübking 2010-12-01 15:34:08 UTC
(In reply to comment #16)
> Any idea "when" mouse events will become KActions? 4.6? 4.7?
Afaics *not* 4.6 - no idea whether actually somebody is (still) working on this.

> Cannot find '.invokeShortcut' in object /component/kwin at org.kde.kglobalaccel

- check whether it's actually there 
qdbus org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/kwin | grep -i shortcut
- then ensure the zoom plugin is active
- try the complete object path
qdbus org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/kwin org.kde.kglobalaccel.Component.invokeShortcut "view_zoom_in"

ps:
actually forgot that this was added - indeed plasma could already use it...
Comment 18 Juan Garcia 2011-02-01 21:29:48 UTC
I tried JeanPhilippe's trick with xbindkeys and sometimes it works and sometimes not. When the xbindkeys is killed and restarted it seems to stop working... and in the end it is a workaround.

Well, but that is not the main topic here. I still hope that the mouse alone can trigger desktop actions like Present Windows. If I want to trigger Present Windows with the middle button (typical 3 button mouse) simply I can't.

I have checked also the KDE 4.6 Desktop Settings -> Mouse Actions but the actions that can be triggered a very limited and only work in the desktop, not in any other Windows. I have also tried System Settings -> Shortcuts and Gestures -> Custom Shortcuts, which support Mouse Gestures. But it does not seem to work.

I think this is a real usability problem. I think that triggering effects on the Screen Edges is ok, but it is slow, lacks usability and intuitiveness. 
To make a fair comparison the current situation with triggering Desktop actions is like if you are a car designer and you will tell your car user that he has to get out of the car trough the roof. And well maybe at the early car days it was ok, but we have a long way since those days. I think the same for KDE: on KDE 4.3 it was ok to trigger desktop effects with key combinations or Screen Edges but we have come a long way since then and I feel that there is no much progress in input usability... users are being still asked to live with it and leave the car trough the roof...
Comment 19 Alexandre Bonneau 2011-06-29 16:12:09 UTC
The problem is you just can't assign mouse buttons to shortcuts.

As stated in bug 237740, it would be GREAT if you could mimic compiz behaviour regarding the ability to zoom with meta+mouseheel_up and down.

Using a keyboard shortcut to zoom, then going back to the mouse to move the zoomed window is not usability feature, it's a bug.
Comment 20 Martin Flöser 2012-04-04 21:37:46 UTC
As the time of this writing our KDE libraries in version 4.x are feature frozen. This means that support for mouse shortcuts cannot be added to the libraries currently used by KWin.

To get this feature we have unfortunately to wait till KWin has been ported to Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 and then someone still needs to first add support for it in the global shortcut system.

After a transition to Wayland it might also be possible that KWin becomes responsible for key and/or mouse shortcuts. But also this will take some time :-)

So overall at the moment, we cannot add this feature and we have to set it as RESOLVED LATER, which is the most appropriate for a feature we would all like to have but just cannot add at the moment.
Comment 21 Martin Flöser 2014-03-19 13:27:01 UTC
Git commit ab8063f02d2faacc5ad01d35bb3a99d4911ecc70 by Martin Gräßlin.
Committed on 14/07/2013 at 20:58.
Pushed by graesslin into branch 'master'.

Export global pointer shortcuts to effect system and use it for cube

Used in cube effect as an example with hard coded ctrl+alt+left click.

M  +5    -0    kwin/effects.cpp
M  +1    -0    kwin/effects.h
M  +1    -0    kwin/effects/cube/cube.cpp
M  +8    -0    kwin/libkwineffects/kwineffects.h

http://commits.kde.org/kde-workspace/ab8063f02d2faacc5ad01d35bb3a99d4911ecc70
Comment 22 launchpad 2020-02-06 14:28:27 UTC
I'm trying to make a global shortcut in Kwin, so that I can perform zooming with:

Zoom In: meta+scrollUP
Zome Out: meta+scrollDown

I see that this bug hasn't had activity since 2014. Did this ever become possible? If so I can't figure it out. When I try to set a Global Alternative that uses the mouse-wheel, it simply scrolls instead of taking that in as the key combination I'm wanting to set.

Please advise.
Comment 23 launchpad 2020-02-06 15:48:14 UTC
I found a work-around:
https://pryp.in/blog/19/zoom-the-screen-with-alt-scroll-in-kde.html
Comment 24 Christoph Feck 2020-03-03 21:29:16 UTC
It was fixed for the cube effect; changing status.

Mouse events are not part of the keyboard shortcut system. See also bug 171295.