launcher does not appear with nub mouse

[Peter Lonjers]

Binary package hint: unity

With a "nub" mouse getting the launcher to appear by mousing the left of the screen is very difficult. With a nub mouse it is very difficult to stop exactly at the edge of the screen unlike with a normal or touch pad mouse. There is bounce effect that keeps the mouse from staying on the exact edge unless you continuously push the mouse to the edge of the screen or are absurdly accurate.

This may seem minor but it is not took me a couple of minutes to actually get the launcher to appear the first time. Now I have to basically continuously push on the edge to get the launcher to open. By adding even a tiny error margin this would be fixed.

I am using a leveno laptop

proposed solution:

* remove delay before appearance
* trigger appearance also on hovering over the leftmost 2-5 pixel (e.g. ~10% of icon width?)

[Bilal Akhtar (bilalakhtar)]

FYI you can also un-hide the launcher immediately by moving mouse to top-left corner of the screen. I am used to doing that, and I don't rely on pressing against the edge.

[Peter Lonjers (plonjers)]

Yea I realize that it is just slower because then you have to move the mouse down to get the icons. Of course you could always use the hot keys too.

But I consider this basically bugging behavior with a nub mouse as it is supposed to work but does not.

[rawphi (raphael-ist)]

there's also a very disturbing delay (0.5 to 0.7s) you have to wait, until the launcher starts to appear. at first, there's no instant feedback that the launcher was triggered at all. I didn't discover this functionality at all, even though i tried out nudging the left edge several times - simply because of this enormous delay.

also, if the mouse is sitting idle on the leftmost pixel before (or was slightly jittering between the two leftmost pixel columns), it is impossible to open the dock with a nub at all.

proposed solution:

* remove delay before appearance
* trigger appearance also on hovering over the leftmost 2-5 pixel (e.g. ~10% of icon width?)

[Peter Lonjers (plonjers)]

I agree with the solutions purposed especially changing the delay as it would fix the problem alone and not cause to many side effects.

Currently with a nub you have to make a fast movement to the edge of the screen then reduce the pressure to the left holding the mouse there until the panel opens. It is very counter intuitive that you have to continuously push. It also wears out your finger until you learn to keep pushing but just at a reduced pressure when you hit the edge. Even after you get this down the delay is annoying.

 With a touch pad mouse the delay and small target make sense. When you swipe to the left the mouse will stop exactly at the edge without need to continuously push. And there are naturally two movements with a delay between them. Your first swipe to hit the left side of the screen and then recenter you finger to make a separate movement to get to your icon.

With a nub though the direction change is continuous because you do not need to recenter your finger on the pad. The delay just becomes dead time where you have to hold the pointer against the edge waiting for the launcher to open. And it is nearly impossible to directly hit the edge without continuously pushing on it.

 I imagine the delay will eventually start to annoy touch pad users at they get better at hitting their target in one swipe to the right spot without needing the second swipe to get to the right part of the launcher.

[Peter Lonjers (plonjers)]

Partially fixed in 11.10 because of the option to decrease the lag to open the launcher. Still a pain for nub users without using compiz-settings to change it but much less of an isssue now.

[John Lea (johnlea)]

This issue should be fixed by the launcher reveal improvements, so marking as a duplicate of the Launcher reveal bug