Left-handed mouser

[Quentin Stafford-Fraser]

Tom Barraza wrote:

> I am one of those few (probably less than 10 percent of the
> computing population) who happens to be left-handed. I have
> switched the left and right mouse buttons on all my accounts...

Mouse button swapping.  Ah, yes.  This is part of what I think I shall
call the Big Philosophical Question (or BPQ).  Simply stated, the Question

is

    "To what degree should a VNC viewer should be influenced by its local
environment, and to what degree should it should be a 'transparent'
porthole through which you access a remote machine?"

If you work mainly on one local machine, and use VNC to access a few
remote machines, then you probably want a VNC viewer to be a well-behaved
part of the local machine.  In Windows, this might mean that you want
Alt-Tab to switch you between the VNC viewer and your local copy of
Powerpoint in the same way as it does on every other app.

If, on the other hand, your computing world lives on one machine and you
move around, accessing it from all over the place on all sorts of
platforms, then you probably want as little interference from the local
world as possible. You want Alt-Tab to switch between apps on your remote
machine regardless of whether or not those particular keystrokes mean
something locally.

This basic question comes up in various forms.  Suppose you're in another
country which has a different keyboard mapping, and you connect back to
your machine at home.  Should your AltGr-Q keypress generate the thing
shown on the local keyboard, or the thing you would expect it to generate
if you were sitting in front of the local machine?  Is it more trouble to
swap the mouse buttons on every viewer you use, or to swap them on every
remote machine you connect to?

For the keyboard, we decided that it was just too confusing to have remote

characters generated which were different from those printed on the local
keyboard, and the viewer will not know anything about the keyboard
configuration at the other end, so we map the local keyboard configuration

onto VNC keysyms as best we can.

For the mouse, we also have to take into account the local end to some
degree because different viewers have different numbers of buttons, so I
think we should offer more flexible local mappings where possible.  I'll
try and think of the best way of configuring this.

Then it will be your choice as to which end you adjust, though you may be
in a state where the local viewer swaps the buttons and the remote end
swaps them back. And what if the local machine also has button-swapping
set?

Regards,
Quentin


--
----------------------------------------------------
Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser        www.orl.co.uk/~qsf
  ORL - The Olivetti & Oracle Research Laboratory



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