Review Request: Make mouse cursor size configurable

[Fredrik Höglund]

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http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/101701/#review4898
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Lucas, first of all I want to say thank you for working on this.

In good UI design it is important to think about the problem the user
wants to solve from the user's point of view, and not in terms of how
the underlying implementation works.

Unfortunately I feel that this feature as it is now falls short of that
mark in a number of ways.

You are essentially giving the user a list of pixel sizes to choose from
and an input box to type it in. To choose a size they have to be able to
picture in their mind how large these sizes are in relation to the monitor.
They also have to understand that if the size they type in isn't
available, the Xcursor library will pick the closest size that is.

Exposing all these technical details of how the Xcursor library works
behind the scenes just detracts from the problem of wanting larger or
smaller cursors.

In my opinion it would be much more intuitive to have a slider that snaps
to the sizes that are available, and update the preview when the user moves
the slider. If the theme only has one size, you would indicate this by
disabling the slider.

Another option is to load a version of the left_ptr cursor for each
available size and display them in the right-hand size of the listview.
The user would select a size by clicking the one they want.

I also don't think it is useful to offer the user a way to go back to
choosing a size automatically based on a heuristic. The user can't predict
what size that will be, so it's akin to having an option to pick a random
size. If they have at one point made an active choice, they can just as
easily make another one.

The KCM should perhaps go back to using the heuristic if the user clicks
the "Defaults" button in the KCM, but not otherwise.

- Fredrik


On June 20, 2011, 10:04 a.m., Lukas Sommer wrote:
> 
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> This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
> http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/101701/
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> 
> (Updated June 20, 2011, 10:04 a.m.)
> 
> 
> Review request for KDE Base Apps, KDE Runtime, kdelibs, and Christoph Feck.
> 
> 
> Summary
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> 
> X11 mouse cursor themes can contain cursors in multiple sizes, making them pseudo-scalable.
> 
> It is yet possible in KDE to configure manually the mouse cursor size (editing kcminput.rc). However, the GUI of the corresponding KControl module didn't provide support to change this. This patch add support for changing the mouse cursor size to the GUI.
> 
> This are mostly GUI related changes. The underlying data structure XCursorTheme did yet provide support for choosing different sizes and only needed some adjustments.
> 
> 
> This addresses bug 90444.
>     http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90444
> 
> 
> Diffs
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> 
>   kcontrol/input/xcursor/xcursortheme.cpp a987487 
>   kcontrol/input/xcursor/themepage.ui 2e38054 
>   kcontrol/input/xcursor/xcursortheme.h b474086 
>   kcontrol/input/xcursor/themepage.h 902148f 
>   kcontrol/input/xcursor/themepage.cpp 24b9efe 
>   kcontrol/input/xcursor/previewwidget.h f4d2c4e 
>   kcontrol/input/xcursor/previewwidget.cpp 3c264fc 
>   kcontrol/input/xcursor/cursortheme.h 8f7834b 
>   kcontrol/input/xcursor/legacytheme.h 23c9d5f 
> 
> Diff: http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/101701/diff
> 
> 
> Testing
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> 
> Tested locally. Works fine for me. Also when using non-standard font DPI values.
> 
> 
> Screenshots
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> 
> 
>   http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/101701/s/188/
> 
>   http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/101701/s/189/
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Lukas
> 
>

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