mouse keys as shortcuts: how to label them?

[Ellis Whitehead]

Hi all,

I've started working on a couple wish-list bugs 
(http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34362 and 
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48062) relating to using the mouse for 
shortcuts.  The two main requests are for using the side buttons for:
	- back/forward in konqueror
	- moving/resizing windows

My question is how should we label the buttons?  I've only thought of bad 
solutions so far.  It would be easy (but sometimes wrong) to do just use the 
following:

Btn	Label
1	"Left Mouse Button"
2	"Right Mouse Button"
3	"Middle Mouse Button"
4	"Scroll Wheel Up"
5	"Scroll Wheel Down"
6	"Left Side Mouse Button"
7	"Right Side Mouse Button"

Currently, buttons 4and 5 (as labeled by X) seem to be hard-coded to scroll-up 
and scroll-down in Qt.  Some mice have extra buttons, but no scroll wheel.  
In such a case, clicking one of the extra buttons is like moving the scroll 
wheel one notch.  The hard-coding is quite unfortunate, because it makes 
using mice with more than three buttons a pain to set up.  However, there is 
no X function for querying which 'buttons' are for the "ZAxis", as far as I 
can find, so I don't think Qt could rectify the problem.

If I label button 4 "Scroll Up", then those users without a scroll wheel will 
get falsly labeled side buttons.  Label it "Button 4" would be quite 
confusing to the majority of users, though.

And there are of course special mice with many buttons, where this typical 
button assignment might not apply at all.

Unless the X developers implement a buttonmap framework (i.e. keymap for the 
mouse), I don't think there will be any good solution.

I think the best course of action would be to go with the mapping I listed 
above, since it'll be ok for most users.  An alternative would be to set up a 
"button label configuration" page, but I'm not especially inclined to do so.

Any suggestions are welcome, otherwise I'll go with the above for now.

Thanks!
Ellis
 
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