[Kde-games-devel] Size grips

[Ian Wadham]

On Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:21 pm, Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> There are already a number of options available to make resizing easier:
> <snip>
> First, I'm sadly over 35 myself... But I use fat window borders. Not that
> my eye-hand coordination is so bad, for now. I just like largish yellow
> borders around my windows :) <snip>
>
Yellow, huh.  Now that *is* radical ... :-)

On Fri, 22 Jun 2007 05:40 am, Burkhard Lehner wrote:
> You shouldn't forget resizing by pressing the Alt key and dragging with the
> right mouse button anywhere within the window. A very nice feature!
>
Ah yes, I also remember Alt-left-button, to move a window without having
to move the mouse up to the title-bar, from my old X Windows days.

Summing up, there are some basic operations an end-user needs to
do with windows in order to manage viewing space on his/her desktop.
One of these is resizing.  The defaults in KDE (and MS Windows) do not
make that one easy or intuitively obvious.  The window borders tend to
be rather hard to hit.  Ways to make resizing easier in KDE are:

1. Choose a window style that has size grips.
2. Add a size grip to the status bar.
3. Add a QSizeGrip widget to the central widget, if there is no status bar.
4. Find the place in Control Center where you can make the window
    border fatter and easier to hit.
5. Find the place in Control Center where you can change the color of
    the window border and make it a more conspicuous target.
6. Click on the icon at the left of the title-bar and follow the popup menu.
7. Use Alt-right-button anywhere in the window you wish to resize.
8. Any others I have forgotten.

Items 1, 4 and 5 depend on you knowing that the options exist and
knowing where to find them (all three are recent discoveries for me,
after about 6 years of KDE use - Control Center is a real jumble, imho).
Items 2 and 3 depend on programming something into an application,
with some loss of generality in the desktop as a whole.  Items 6 and 7
are in the KDE User Guide, along with the border-dragging method, but
they are quite a long way into the manual, so not very easy to find.

The manual itself is not easy to find either.  It is three levels down
in the SuSE Help Center on my machine and if you left or right-click
on an empty desktop area (KDE 3.4.2), there is no popup help.

So how is a new user of KDE supposed to find out stuff like this?
And if he/she does not find it out, what is the point of having the
features in the first place?  Surely they are not just for the benefit of
KDE devotees like us?  These are rhetorical questions, but I believe
they should lie at the heart of KDE usability concerns.  Size grips
are unimportant compared to that.

All the best, Ian W.