Grab key scrolling

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Tue, 2007-04-17 at 11:09 +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> On Apr 17, 2007, at 0:07 , Jim Gettys wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2007-04-16 at 16:42 +0200, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> we have the grab key on the keyboard which, when pressed, should
> >> activate the scrolling mode. It should work like this:
> >>
> >> 1 The user press the grab key on the keyboard.
> >> 2 The scrollbars of the current view are highlighted.
> >> 3 Movements on the trackpad (both resistive and not resistive)  
> >> scrolls
> >> the view. The mouse pointer is "locked" and does not change position.
> >>
> >> We are having problems with the X side of this but I think Jim  
> >> said to
> >> Eben it was possible. Can someone with more with more X knowledge  
> >> than
> >> me suggest a good way of implementing it?
> >
> > I don't believe I ever claimed this is possible.
> >
> > I think we're going to have to extend X to get these semantics.
> >
> > The closest one can come is to confine the cursor to a window; but  
> > that
> > is different than nailing it to one place and causing the window
> > coordinate system to move.
> >                                         - Jim
> >
> >> What I tried is to detach the pointer device from the core pointer.
> >> (XChangePointerDevice). But then how do I get notified about trackpad
> >> movements?
> 
> 
> How about using scroll events?
> 
> In X, scrolling mice just generate button presses that are mapped to  
> the Y or X axis in the config file. Many apps can deal with that  
> directly. So when pressing the grab key, we'd switch the touchpad  
> driver into "scroll mode" where movement generates those button  
> clicks. And because no actual movement events will be delivered, the  
> pointer would stay in place. As an added benefit, on a regular  
> machine this behavior can easily emulated with the scroll wheel,  
> without introducing a secondary code path.

I thought about that too. The limitations I see with this approach are:

1 Scroll events can only be horizontal or vertical, you can't move
diagonally for example.
2 The precision is limited since you can only move of a certain step.

The fact that they are already supported by applications it's clearly a
big plus though. Maybe for Gen1 we could implement something using
scrolling events and for later releases aim to add better semantics to
X. Eben what do you think?

Marco