[no subject]

[JLK@MIT-MC]

r.e. the mouse cursor inside menus, I find menus rather painful to use in their
current form because of the problem of accidently skipping out of the menu in
the vertical direction.  A similar statement applies to the scroll window in
the editor - it is impossible to use the mouse to position the cursor to
columns 1,2, or 3 (i.e. it is too easy to skip into the scroll window without
wanting to).

There are actually two problems:  one is the sensitivity of mouse movements
while in the menu (I find it too sensitive, but I realize this is a function
of differing degrees of experience with the mouse and manual dexterity - I
would generally prefer different scalings of mouse movements inside and
outside of menus); second, is the difficulty of positioning the mouse near
edges of regions where different windows will be invoked.  The edge skipping
problem could be solved either by providing more space between the last menu
item (or the edge of the edit buffer) and the boundary.  If this is undesirable
because it uses valuable screen area, then some virtual potential barrier
should exist across boundaries (this barrier might best be infinite in some
cases, or only sticky in other cases - maybe the concept of a virtually
elastic barrier would help, that is you have to move the mouse well outside
the edit buffer before you get into the scroll window).  In the case of menus,
I think an absolute barrier in the vertical direction, and no barrier in the
horizontal direction would be best (that is you bang into the top and bottom
edges, but can easily skip out horizontally).  An alternative to a barrier
based on position (which may be hard to implement), perhaps a barrier which
required a particular velocity of impact would be better (i.e. if you move
the mouse in a "hard" stroke, it would get out, but if you are moving it
slowly, as you would when trying to position it for some purpose, it wouldn't).

Is it easy to globally set the scaling of mouse movements?  Maybe this is
something that could be customized in one's init file to correspond to
differences in manual dexterity among different people.