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Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

I have one UI pet peeve: mousing over large screens.

I look at it this way: when the Apple Macintosh made the mouse popular in 1984, it was with a 9 inch, 512x324 resolution display. I got started computing on a 17 inch, 640x480 resolution display, so not that much larger in terms of usable screen real estate. Now, I have two 22 inch, 1680x1050 resolution displays, one turned vertically. For comparison, I made this image http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/thOvKDvamA7iCeQLCdyGIw?...

The red box in the middle is the old Macintosh display. It looks roughly 5 inches across the diagonal. Mousing interfaces haven't changed in any significant way in the last 30 years, but displays have grown astronomically in that time. If arguments against the mouse over text interfaces were contentious back-in-the-day, it's even worse now. My wrists can't take this anymore.

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Off topic: What's the panel to the left of your solution explorer in Visual Studio?

That would be a plugin, the name of which escapes me, that turns the scrollbar for the code editor into a thumbnail image of the full length of code.

sounds a lot like the 'minimap', which I think was first used in the Sublime editor. There's an emacs version at http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MiniMap that I haven't gotten around to trying yet, but keep meaning to.

Crank up the mouse acceleration?

Then it becomes an issue to hit buttons. As the screen resolution grows, the percentage of the screen area that the button takes up shrinks. If you increase the speed of the mouse to compensate for the size of the screen, it makes hitting precise targets more difficult.

Odd. I have two 1920x1280 monitors (arranged as yours). With my mouse acceleration I can go from extreme left to extreme right without much effort (don't have to lift my palm off the desk). Yet I can easily hit small targets a few pixels across. Buttons are easy.

This is on Windows - haven't switch to Mac to test it - maybe the OS X acceleration is linear and hence a bit sucky?

Not really an issue on my mac with two 1280x1024 displays. I can span both monitors in about 2-3 inches of mouse movement. Some people really like text-based input though, which explains the popularity of Apps like Quicksilver.

Mac OS has even more acceleration than Windows by default. That's a common complaint among new Mac users, who often incorrectly and adamantly insist both that Windows has a linear mapping where 1 inch on the mouse pad equals N inches on the screen, and that that is the right way to do it.

Maybe it's different in OS X, but my (admittedly single) large screen doesn't pose a problem. If I'm mousing from one corner to another, I move the mouse more definitively and I cross the screen in 3.5 inches of mouse travel (just tested). When I'm near a button I move the mouse more tentatively, and one inch of cursor travel corresponds to an entire inch of mouse travel.

So it's not just cursor speed, but acceleration that matters. And if it's implemented properly, I don't think your issue would be an issue at all.

OSX acceleration is quite different from others. I'm not sure what their curve is, but I really like it. I took to it in a couple seconds, and I'm faster (ie, speed to do action, so accuracy plays in heavily) with my trackpad than most people are with mice.

That's what mouse acceleration is for (in comparison with mouse speed) - acceleration deals with when you move the mouse slowly it moves slowly for precision use, but when you move it quickly it moves faster than a linear proportional speedup of the slow movement.

When it's not right, the end result is moving the mouse quickly to get near a button, then slowing down and the cursor slows down more and you both miss the button and get annoyed that it's only creeping ever more slowly towards it like a digital Zeno's arrow.

Yes, that has been my main problem with acceleration, I have never been able to set it to be able to move consistently across the screen in both wide swaths and with precision. Partial work around: using a trackball. The ball has momentum, so I can give it a spin and it will continue to roll. However, this brings up a new issue. Trackballs make mousing in relatively straight lines much more difficult, make image editing a real PITA.

Really, most of the screen real estate is completely uninteresting from the perspective of the mouse. Contextual gestures, where sliding the mouse changes the selected control point, I think has potential.

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