Middle clicking the keyboard layout indicator has behaviour inconsistent with other indicator applets

[Ingo Gerth]

One possible solution would be to cycle through languages on middle-click.

This is functionality I have long wanted to see and should be easy to implement.

[Timothy Arceri (t-fridey)]

Can you please explain WHY you would like to see this functionality? (what it will make easier and why etc)

Can you also state what Desktop you are currently using Gnome 2, 3, KDE?

Gnome 3 has two distinct panels in its settings. One for keyboard layout, one for language support I don't think your bug report makes much sense in Gnome 3.

[Ingo Gerth (igerth)]

This is an issue that I have when using the Unity shell. I have an English keyboard for programming purposes but sometimes need to write German texts. This means that I have to switch the keyboard layout quite often to have Letters like äöüß available.

Other indicators in Ubuntu support middle click functionality as well. An example is the sound indicator, where I can middle click the icon to toggle mute/sound. Just middle clicking on the keyboard indicator to toggle between the available languages would make my workflow faster and easier, reducing the number of clicks.

Many users that use Ubuntu in English but must write texts in other languages as well (and those are many, I can tell) would benefit from this feature.

Finally, what package should be selected to be affected for this bug? I could not figure out which package contains this indicator.

[Chris Wilson (notgary-deactivatedaccount)]

Thanks a lot for reporting this, however as this is actually a feature request it unfortunately does not constitute a paper cut.

[Ingo Gerth (igerth)]

Chris, in my opinion this is not a feature request. It rather is a consistency issue.

The indicators provide middle click functionality. Some apply this, some not. But the keyboard indicator even gives visual feedback (turns gray) while nothing happens. In my opinion the user expects that something would happen, and this could easily be implemented in fact.

On a side note, if this is a feature request, where should I post it? I already opened several similar bugs concerning Unity in the past which got attention from the developers and were eventually implemented.
I know there is the brainstorm, but lets be honest: Only 10^(-20) of the proposals ever get attention from developers.

[Chris Wilson (notgary-deactivatedaccount)]

Ingo, you are indeed correct that behaviour of similar features should likewise be similar, and the subject of inconsistency is very much covered by the paper cuts project. I use a laptop with a trackpad so have never noticed any middle-click behaviour. I guess you learn something new every day :)

As for discussions about Unity features, there are a few places this can be done. You can forward bug reports to unity both in Ubuntu and the upstream package, and there is the Ayatana Design project, which handles design work for the various Ayatana projects, which can be foud here https://launchpad.net/ayatana-design.

Given how prominent in the Ubuntu landscape Unity is at the moment, it's going to be deluged with bug reports, and given that the upstream project is currently sitting at over 2200 open bugs, it's likely that your reports may get lost in all the noise. The best place to discuss the features of Unity is on the Ayatana mailing list, which you can join by joining the Ayatana team here on Launchpad (https://launchpad.net/~ayatana) and then joining the mailing list which you can do in the bottom left of the team page.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

closing the "unity" components, the request is specific to an indicator and the concerned component is the one providing this indicator rather than unity

[Fabian Schmidt (fschmidt)]

I want to look into that. Where can I find the code for that?

[Fabian Schmidt (fschmidt)]

Oh and is it really the settings-daemon that is affected or is that the indicator (or is the indicator part of the settings-daemon)

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

As I said on IRC today, I don't think there's much point in trying to fix this now as we plan to recode the keyboard indicator during the raring cycle as a standalone indicator instead of as a patch to gnome-settings-daemon.

Once that's done, then we should look into fixing this bug.

[Fabian Schmidt (fschmidt)]

Hi is there any update on the status of the indicator? I am still interested in fixing the bug.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Fabian, I have just updated the design spec for the input source menu to include middle-clicking. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TextEntry?action=diff&rev2=20&rev1=19> If you would like to help out with the implementation, I suggest contacting Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <https://launchpad.net/~mathieu-tl>.

[Fabian Schmidt (fschmidt)]

I am switching my attention to the phone development

[Ingo Gerth (igerth)]

As of saucy, there is a regression. Not only do we still miss the middle click behaviour, but the previously available scrolling on the icon to swap layouts is also lost.

[Charles Kerr (charlesk)]

Due to wiki changes, the link Matthew mentioned above in comment 12 is now broken.

The spec changes he mentioned can now be found at

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LanguageAndText?action=diff&rev1=19&rev2=20

[PS Jenkins bot (ps-jenkins)]

Fix committed into lp:indicator-keyboard at revision 165, scheduled for release in indicator-keyboard, milestone Unknown

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package indicator-keyboard - 0.0.0+14.04.20131125-0ubuntu1

---------------
indicator-keyboard (0.0.0+14.04.20131125-0ubuntu1) trusty; urgency=low

  [ William Hua ]
  * Enable middle click and mouse wheel scrolling. (LP: #887139)
  * Add accountsservice.vapi (accountsservice no long ships it).

  [ Allan LeSage ]
  * Add gcov coverage tooling; use ./autogen.sh --enable-gcov and then
    make coverage-html to see a report of what's covered. You can read
    about the rationale in this old blog post:
    http://qualityhour.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/test-coverage-tutorial-
    for-cc-autotools-projects/ .

  [ Lars Uebernickel ]
  * Set the indicator's position according to
    http://wiki.ubuntu.com/SystemComponents.

  [ Ubuntu daily release ]
  * Automatic snapshot from revision 185
 -- Ubuntu daily release <email address hidden> Mon, 25 Nov 2013 03:55:06 +0000