[TxMt] Feature Idea: Photoshop/Safari-style drag navigation

[Jonathan Ragan-Kelley]

> Control brings up a context menu here. Tried all other modifiers as
> well. Sure this isn't a 3rd party extension?

Turns out it's Saft's "Control-Drag" option.  And it's not ctrl-click
-- it's just ctrl+mouse movement (with no mouse buttons down) -- so it
doesn't conflict with context menus.

> Tell me about it, under Panther I was using uControl which gave a
> virtual scroll wheel (by holding down ctrl-option and moving the
> mouse), unfortunately that kernel-ext. broke with the release of
> Tiger, and it took a long time to get rid of the habbit, especially
> since uControl also simulated a horizontal scroll wheel (which turns
> out to be much more useful than vertical scrolling, since many
> applications neglect to map keys to horizontal scrolling).
>
> As for trackpad, doesn't Apple support scroll wheel simulation when
> using both fingers on the trackpad and moving these up/down (I think
> it needs to be enabled, don't have a trackpad myself)?

So the key here is that it's not the same as a scroll wheel --
simulated or otherwise.  For starters, it moves in both axes
simultaneously (while scroll wheel simulation on the new PBs only work
on one axis at a time).  But much more critically, it:

1. Moves in the *opposite* directly
2. Moves exactly one-to-one with the mouse movement

Open an Adobe app (or even Preview) and use the Hand tool.  Any
remotely serious Photoshop user no doubt uses this tool all the time,
without thinking -- hold space, drag somewhere else, release.  Same
thing in Saft, with the sole exception that the mouse button remains
up.

> I'd prefer it as a system-wide patch (was hoping that uControl could
> got updated to Tiger).

No doubt -- that would be awesome.  However, I fear that by nature of
not quite being the same as scroll-wheel simulation it might require
code injection for system-wide modification of various scroll-area
methods to really nail, and even that probably wouldn't work totally
consistently in variously customized scroll areas.  I'd love to see
someone try, though.

Anyway, like I said, it was just an idea that struck me when using
Safari recently.  The exact Photoshop/Saft-style implementation may
not be perfect, but seems like something with which it would at least
be worth experimenting, as I expect it would take next to no effort to
modify your text area widget to emulate this exact behavior.
-jrk