Talk:Pointing device gesture

Section Idea - List of GUI Gestures
New to editing wiki articles, but I'd like to add that I think this page might benefit from some examples. These might inclue: drag and drop, double-clicking an icon to open file or execute program, text selection, touch-screen pinch and spread, etc. Example of how this is done well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch#Multi-touch_gestures ~ Curtis — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.126.56.234 (talk) 22:08, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Gestures directions
There seems to be a fundamental disagreement about the directions of mouse gestures. The example on this page, Opera's going back (drag to the left), is the opposite of an iPhone/iPod Touch's going back (drag to the right). It's all a matter of relativity: are you moving, or is the GUI moving? While it may be presumptuous for Wikipedia to try influencing a standard, this article could mention the inconsistency. (Personally, I now find the iPhone/iPod Touch's choice most intuitive.)

Davidmenges (talk) 18:20, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Move to Gesture (computing)
No reason why gestures should be limited to mice, as the iPhone demonstrates. Anyone comments on renaming this article? hateless 00:37, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep as is. &mdash;shoecream 06:25, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Time to revisit the topic. I searched for "mouse gesture" and was expecting to find something about multi-touch and tablet interfaces, as well as mousepads and ye olde fashioned mouse gestures (fond memories of Black and White, or ambiguous memories, if I'm honest). I think this article should be moved and expanded into Gesture (computing) because these things have all evolved together and furthermore, because of the influence of the iPad, gestures are becoming increasingly standard. This article seems to be living in the past when mouse gestures were curiosity features for disabled access. The laptop I'm using now has gesture support enabled by default (much to my surprise, hence why I'm here...) GM Pink Elephant (talk) 17:10, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Drag and drop a mouse gesture
I don't think that drag and drop should be considered a mouse gesture as today we think of it. It's indeed a combination of mouse movemment and click, mas it's only a limited mouse gesture.. because it's not a general command, it's specific to that file not like when you go back on opera. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 193.136.33.130 (talk) 22:53, 30 January 2007 (UTC).


 * I agree. Would drawing something in Microsoft Paint be a mouse gesture? Not really. Mouse gestures are "symbols" drawn on screen to execute an action. - Monkey —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.253.225.165 (talk) 04:56, 11 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree also, as selecting files via click-drag would also be considered a mouse gesture. But to be honest, it's just the first 'gesture' idea to come along for computers, we should see the opinion of someone who believes that it is a mouse gesture and judge from that. Pazako (talk) 03:27, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Open source implementations
Can we add the open source implementation/lib links back in? I came to this article to find links to improve my own software with a standard OS library which this article used to link to. I'm the author of the (old & open source) Gesture Magic and was caught out because of the blog spam clause http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ELNO (fair enough - I don't need to publicise it and DON'T want it added back in) but removing all OS links is cutting your nose to spite your face. If there is no response to this within 1 month I'll revert *OS software library* only changes (Gesture Magic, whilst OS too, is on my blog and thus won't be re-added). As an aside the blog rule is a poor/contentious wikipedia issue since published works/experts in a field may never actually publish something officially, e.g. a long quote or unique implementation feature, but as there is a lot of blog/advertising spam if it's to succeed I guess new research areas like this need to lose out on content that might be useful to some people. Brownb2 (talk) 09:31, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * We're an encyclopedia, not a how to manual. If the links aren't encyclopedic (which is to say reliable, informative, neutral and extensive) they shouldn't be on the page.  Google is available to turn up sources on how to do things, not us.  WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules: simple/complex 14:31, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
 * "We're"? Are you speaking on behalf of Wikipedia? What a coincidence, I, sorry we, must be too, but we digress. We have decided that open source code has all of the above qualities, and even follows Wikipedia's own inclusion policies due to the amount of detail, as often it would be too much to include in the body of the article, such as elaboration on pattern matching or dot product in the context of mouse gestures. Fortunately I (we) don't give enough of a flying monkey's to start a trivial edit war, but clearly as a seasoned editor you, sorry we, should have realised that an article without (non spam/information) external links has less merit. But good luck with your crusade to rid the wiki pages of those evil informative external links (damn, damn them to hell!) - you (we) might also want to check out Handwriting_recognition for some new fodder, we expect to see that one picked clean by Friday. Chop chop! Brownb2 (talk) 22:42, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Blender Mouse Gestures
The 3d moddeling program Blender provides a functionality I would describe as Mouse Gestures. For example, resizing a selected object can be don by moving the mousepointer in one direction, the opposite direction and back in the original direction, while the right mouse button is on hold. This draws a kind of Z with sharp eges on the screen, and after releasing the right button will make the object bigger/smaller when you move your mouse. Another exapmle is rotating, by drawing a circle while holding your right mouse button. Maybe this should be mentioned in this article? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kwazel (talk • contribs) 09:38, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Move
I was being a little too bold and moved the page without consensus. Unless mouse gesture is a well accepted software term it should be pointing device. As mentioned above Gesture (computing) is an equally applicable title.username 1 (talk) 22:57, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
 * "Mouse Gesture" is a widely known and accepted software term. Google it and see how many hits and programs you get, like StrokeIt, Sensiva, etc. Cerberus™ (talk) 01:04, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Putting back links to software applications
Some time ago, all external links to applications and libraries were removed. The apparent reason was that the editors who added those links were suspected of promoting software. That may have been true. However, I came to this page to find an overview of existing mouse gesture applications, because I remembered using it years ago to find out what options existed—this time, I had to dig deep into history in order to find the list I needed. How can this be? Our ecyclopedia should be about providing information, as complete as possible, to its readers. This goal should only be so severely compromised when the damage otherwise done would be even greater. I see no damage of comparable magnitude.

There may be a rule against this somewhere among the policy pages; I can imagine that a list with so many external links is not desirable. The list in this article ought to be separated from it and made into a full list in a new article, with links to the articles of the respective programs, preferably with footnotes to references pointing to the programs' home pages. This would arguably be the most useful set-up for readers looking to compare and try these programs. The footnotes are necessary because they will save the reader much work if he wants to check whether these programs are up to date: he will need quick access to their home pages. Of course it would be much better if the links were kept up to date by editors, but I doubt whether this is practicable. At any rate, being forced to load a program's article first, so as to get to its external link, takes much more time, especially since Wikipedia loads rather slowly for many readers, as it does for me.

It would be even better if this separate list could include a detailed comparison and history of the applications. Unfortunately I do not have the time at the moment to write this comparison, or even to convert what we have into a separate list, like the ones I will give below. But does that mean that we ought to simply destroy the valuable information that we have so far, in this admittedly flawed list? I say we owe it to the world's strokers* to keep the list available at least temporarily, until the full list is made by someone. Perhaps an appropriate label could be added to the top of the article, like "work in progress, see discussion"; I am not familiar enough with existing templates—nor do I know how to find them—to do it myself.

`*) An inside joke about the program StrokeIt in this very list, to which, incidentally, I am not affiliated by any means, as I am not affiliated to any of these applications.

That said, I will give a few examples of articles with lists of software: This is what we ought to be aiming at. Cerberus™ (talk) 02:11, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
 * List_of_PDF_software
 * List_of_web_browsers


 * P.S. This deletion happened despite the fact that those links had been there for years: between the article's inception in 2001 and the links' deletion in July 2009, they were always there, slowly growing over the years into the extensive list we have now. Cerberus™ (talk) 02:20, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
 * WP:ELNO prohibits such lists of external links. You'll notice that the list of articles you cite as examples do not contain external links to the products, and generally restrict themselves to products with established wiki articles. - 75.130.105.200 (talk) 20:41, 28 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Technically, WP:ELNO doesn't prohibit lists of external links, if an inclusion criteria can be established for the article by consensus (ie: simply existing isn't enough). As a default, many articles simply use notability as defined at WP:N as the inclusion criteria (such as in the examples provided by Cerberus). But where consensus supports it, other criteria have been used in some articles, such as an independent ranking of the top (some number) based upon a meaningful criteria, where a reliable source for such a ranking is available and agreed upon (which does not appear to be the case here, so I support at least trimming it to just those that meet WP:N until such time that consensus supports a different inclusion criteria). --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 21:15, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

It's said in the beginning of the article that this device is useful for people who have difficulties using the keyboard. can you give me an instance for a problem that can cause it (this disability)? 85.65.73.40 (talk) 06:43, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

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Forms of dragging
Is the History section trying to talk about drag and drop specifically, or dragging generally? It seems to be confusing the two. The text of the general section seems to be talking about dragging generally, but the link is to drag and drop.

Drag, as I was taught it, means to move the mouse while holding down one of its buttons, regardless of the operation being performed by doing so.

Drag and drop, OTOH, means to do this in order to move an object from one place to another.

Here are just a few uses to which software puts dragging:
 * 1) To draw freehand in a graphics application
 * 2) To draw a defined shape, such as a line, rectangle or circle, in a graphics application
 * 3) To select objects, or an area in a raster image, by surrounding with a rectangle or other shape
 * 4) To select a section of text
 * 5) To move a window from one location on the screen to another
 * 6) To move an object in a document from one location on the page to another
 * 7) To resize something (typically by dragging a border or handle)
 * 8) To move or copy an object, such as a file or email message, to a particular container, or embed it in a document
 * 9) To open a file in a particular application
 * 10) To scroll or rotate a view
 * 11) To operate a slider control

Of these, I suppose use 8 is the primary sense of the phrase "drag and drop". Use 9 is just another application of the same kind of UI to do something different, and may be implemented using the same API in a given OS. Uses 5, 6 and 11 may count in that you're picking something up from one place by pushing the mouse button down and releasing it in another by releasing the mouse button. Others are grey areas, but 1 to 4 certainly aren't this and thus aren't drag and drop.

At the moment, as far as I can see, WP lacks coverage of dragging generally, thus making it sound as though drag and drop is the only thing dragging is used for. Does anybody fancy a stab at helping redress the balance? — Smjg (talk) 21:08, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

"Dragging" listed at Redirects for discussion
The redirect [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dragging&redirect=no Dragging] has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at  until a consensus is reached. -- Tamzin  &#91;cetacean needed&#93; (they&#124;xe&#124;she) 22:47, 4 December 2023 (UTC)