[TxMt] question: mouse or not?

[Charilaos Skiadas]

On Dec 20, 2006, at 2:26 AM, Piero D'Ancona wrote:

> Haris: you mentioned that a command using a mouse
> is unacceptable. I do not understand this and I
> am intrigued, would you elaborate?
>
> I also hate the mouse and love the keyboard, as
> any other respectable geek. But this is only because
> keyboard is much faster and much more accurate.
> But I have no ideological stance against the mouse.
> If at some point I find that using a mouse is much
> more convenient for some purpose, I use it
> immediately. E.g., I would not draw a
> picture using the keyboard (neither would you
> I guess).
>
> So the point with the interface for labels is exactly that
> I feel the keyboard is not the faster tool for the task;
> clicking in a nice list is indeed faster.

I guess this is where we disagree. I don't think clicking on the list  
is faster. If I am in the middle of typing a lot of stuff, I would  
have to stop that and move my hand to the mouse in order to click at  
the appropriate label, probably would also have to scroll around a bit.

This of course depends on the list we are talking about, and the way  
you use the keyboard to select an item. If you just use the arrow  
keys, and there are 100 items there, then of course it won't be as  
fast. If you use the first letters to narrow things down first, then  
it is faster I think. Further, in the context menu you have the  
option of using either the mouse or the keyboard, to make your  
selection. With the HTML window, you have no such option.

It's not a question of an ideological stance, I just don't think this  
labels thing is best accomplished via a mouse-only interface, at  
least not without an alternative. When writing math, the last thing  
on my mind is using the mouse.

As far as the HTML view is concerned, I actually think that you  
should make the entire text, instead of just the \label{..} parts,  
clickable. The user should be able to just hover over the correct  
block of text and click, instead of having to track down the small  
region where the \label part is. That would make it more usable imo.

Another idea would be to have the text, or perhaps more of the text,  
show up as a tool tip when you hover over an item in the HTML view.

I like the idea of having the HTML view as an optional method, after  
some polishing (like automatic updating  in the background, perhaps  
different coloring of the equations or something like that), but I  
don't think it should be the only way, i.e. replace the existing  
label completion command.

> I should also
> mention that I proposed to the PDFView's brilliant
> developer (Andrea Bergia) to implement a click-on-
> the-formula feature (you click on the formula in pdf
> and the \ref is inserted in the tex file...)
>
That is an interesting idea indeed. Though this might be a bit more  
editor-specific than the plain pdfsync. It would probably require  
some javascript calls. I would actually prefer it if somehow the \ref  
is passed to the clipboard, instead of being inserted directly into  
TM. It is probably also easier to implement, though I'm not sure the  
pdf file has this information at all.

> Piero

Haris