Re: mouse clicks on tool-bar -- why not recognize different mouse buttons?

[Miguel Frasson]

"Jan D." <address@hidden> writes:

> > However, since a tool-bar item is just a graphic (not a specific name,
> > like
> > a menu item), why not treat tool-bar items more like we treat portions of
> > the mode-line: why not recognize different mouse button events on
> > tool-bar
> > items? Why not, say, be able to have mouse-3 on a given tool-bar button
> > do
> > something different from mouse-1 on the same item?
> 
> No other application I know of does this.  Emacs is already very different
> from standard GUI applications, and adding more Emacs specific GUI things
> will only make it harder to port to current and future toolkits.  Also,
> what
> kind of operations do you have in mind?

Other mouse buttons could be bound, for example, for a popup menu for
customization, properties or related actions.  In firefox (maybe mozilla
is the same), for instance, a right click in the bookmark toolbar allows
customization.  It would be interesting to allow user to customize a
toolbar button, if it makes sense, by right-clicking on it, and selecting
"Customize this button", or "customize toolbar" there.  Think in a "Print"
button.  One can just print pushing it, but one could select printer,
select printing options, etc.  Why allow Control + click and not
right-button click, for instance?

Maybe, it was a implementation not-so-fortunate decision that toolbar
buttons are bounded to fake keys in tool-bar-map, and only modifiers can
be added (different mouse buttons don't generate modifiers)... This is the
problem on changing now.  However, if we have fake keys, why not to have
fake modifiers, in some sense?

Miguel.

-- 
Miguel Vinicius Santini Frasson
http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~frasson