30 Sep
2010
30 Sep
'10
10:13 a.m.
On 9/30/10 11:38 AM, Doc wrote:
If I remember rightly, that was a feature of one of the window managers,
rather than the X server itself, but it was indeed a feature. I want to
say it was either twm or mwm, and I'm pretty sure it was configurable.
It's not part of the window manager, it's part of the "toolkit".
That word has a slightly special meaning in X; basically it's a
higher-level set of widgets that sits atop raw Xlib.
Typically-implemented widgets are buttons, menus, and...scrollbars.
The behavior that Jules mentions is specific to the scrollbars
implemented by Xt, for "X toolkit", which is a standard toolkit that
ships with X11. Nowadays, though, most apps use other toolkits like
GTK+ or Qt.
Hmm, I think X windows had something similar at one
time - middle
button to
drag the bar, left button to automatically go up and page and right
button
to go down a page (if I remember right, it did jump by a screenful,
rather
than smaller increments)
Interesting. I have played with a fairly primitive X setup, no modern
window managers and so on, and yes, it did some of that, but I'd not
registered the direction-switching bit, which (for my money) is the
core usability feature. ISTR going "ooh, it's like RISC OS", playing
to see if the features I liked were there, and being disappointed -
but I might have missed it. And just to pick a nit, it's "X" or
"The X Window System", but never
ever "X Windows". :^)
Thank you. =) I was debating mentioning it but didn't want to sound
too pedantic. I'm glad you did. :) "It's a window system called X, not
a system called X Window".
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL