G'day,
All of the following is predicated on fvwm being able to actively limit
the position of a mouse that isnot at the edge of a screen, and if this
isn't the case, then such a feature would only be possible to add in X
itself. However, if possible, this kind of policy is window manager style
policy that should be pushed up to the window manager, and in our case can
make FVWM ever more superior to all those other crappy window managers out
there :)
On multiple screens using xinerama (or otherwise), one (or myself, anyway)
typically has applications maximised or positioned near the edge of one
screen. There is also typically a physical border between screens of
several centimetres. It is not that easy to position the mouse on a
window border to manipulate that window, if the mouse keeps on flicking
over to the other screen as you're trying to finely position it. The
physical seperation of the monitors screws with the hand-eye coordination,
and limits the ability of the brain to "servo" the cursor into position.
It would be quite nice if I could move the mouse quickly to the top
left corner of a right hand screen, and have the mouse pause there --
just like the edge resistance of the edge of the viewport, before the
mouse is released onto the next virtual page. This would be distance
based pause, rather than a time based pause. It would be most ideal
if such a hystersis was a configurable number of pixels, so the user
could adjust the rough number of pixels that would be in that physical
gap between their monitors. If on the right screen, you could flick
the mouse to the left and aim for somewhere in that gap, and know that
the mouse will stay on the edge of the right hand screen until you
push the mouse "over" that barrier between the monitors:
~ 200 pixels
<---->
_______________________ _______________________
| ___________________ || ___________________ |
| | | || | | |
| | screen1 | || | screen2 | |
| | | || | | |
| | | || | | |
| | 1024x768 | || | 1024x768 | |
| | | || | <--- * mouse movement
| |___________________| || |___________________| |
|_______________________||_______________________|
^-- 200 pixel wide hysteresis for barrier
Of course, it would need to be xinerama aware, and would want to cope
with any arbitrary orientation of monitors and not get confused by
dead gaps resulting from mismatched monitor sized. Coping with
matched monitors would be a good first step that I'd be perfectly happy
with, though.
So, would it be possible?
--
Tim Connors
