Re: Context menus and mouse-3

[Thibaut Verron]

Le mer. 16 sept. 2020 à 17:06, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> a écrit :
>
> > From: Thibaut Verron <thibaut.verron@gmail.com>
> > Date: Wed, 16 Sep 2020 16:37:16 +0200
> > Cc: Tak Kunihiro <tkk@misasa.okayama-u.ac.jp>, juri@linkov.net,
> >       emacs-devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> >
> > > > - Horizontal scroll by wheel is supported.
> > > > - Moving text using mouse is supported.
> > > > * Contextual menu is not supported yet.
> > >
> > > Yes, we do support contextual menus, just press C-mouse-3.
> >
> > It is only contextual if "context" just means "major mode".
>
> That's the "context" that we decided was relevant.  We can decide to
> give it a different interpretation, but that doesn't mean we don't
> support contextual menus.

We can go with that definition, but then we will have to accept that
it will be yet another point where the Emacs language differs from the
usual understanding. I don't suggest reforming the language to fix the
existing such points, but I believe that we should do our best to
avoid creating new ones.

It seems easy enough here, since the C-mouse-3 menu already has a
name: it is the major-mode menu.
By contrast, the suggested library mouse3.el does offer a contextual menu.


> Also, please don't forget that we have the most popular
> context-dependent action for mouse-sensitive text on mouse-2.

[And in the absence of a context, the same button does something
useful too, but with a confusing twist (the primary selection which is
neither the kill ring nor the system clipboard).]

I don't find mouse-2 easy to enter reliably, and I'd much rather see
those actions easy to reach in a mouse-3 menu.
Also, as pointed earlier in the thread, there are still mice with 2
buttons, for example laptop touchpads, and the buttons are typically
mouse-1 and mouse-3, making those actions inaccessible.
[It might be related to the fact that most applications and most users
call those buttons mouse-1 and mouse-2 respectively, mouse-3 being the
middle-click. Cf the aforementioned language divergence. :)]