Touchpad navigation style.

[OficineRobotica]

I have this problem that I have been living with since I discovered FC but now while working with relatively large assemblies it has becomed unbearable.
While using the "touchpad" navigation style, while rotating the view , if the cursor happens to finish over some geometry in the 3d view , on mouse release it selects that geometry. I'll try to explain myself better: For rotating the view in this navigation style we need to press shift->double tap with hold and drag on the touch pad. The cursor on the screen stays stiil while the view rotates. If some geometry happens to finish under the cursor it get's selected. This shouldn't happen.

While this navigation style is surprisingly efficient once one gets used to it , imagine the frustration of needing to select geometry, usually back to back in assemblies and while rotating having the wrong edge or face selected just because the cursor was over it. So it becomes a continuous zooming in and out trying to avoid hitting the wrong geometry.

Can someone please give some advice?

P.S.
- yes, I have some mouse laying around the house but I grown too accustomed to the touch pad navigation style and whoever coded it did a wonderful job
- the tower pc is usually occupied by my son so I'm forced to use the laptop. And that is a bug in itself

[chrisb]

DeepSOIC had worked on gesture mode, where some events seem to double fire. Now we see something similar with touchpad navigation style. Is this a general issue?

[OficineRobotica]

I'vd tried the gesture navigation style and I don't get the extra selecting. I only get it with the touchpad mode. Yes, that is the best way to describe it. Double fire. On mouse release it triggers a left click also selecting geometry. Thank you for clearing that up.

Altough gesture navigation has the super useful feature of rotation focus I can't get along with the pan method. Usually a touchpad is set to 2 fingers tap for right click but doing that and moving the fingers on the touch pad triggers the zoom instead of pan. I need to physically press the right button on the touch pad and then pan with the other hand. This gets cumbersome and the pan method of the touchpad style is better suited for .....well the touchpad.

[chrisb]

I guess that gesture is suitable if the touchpad recognizes 3 fingers on the pad.

[OficineRobotica]

DeepSOIC had worked on gesture mode, where some events seem to double fire. Now we see something similar with touchpad navigation style. Is this a general issue?

Do you think this deserves a bug report?

[chrisb]

If you tested in 0.19 and if others can reproduce: yes.

Here I cannot reproduce.

OS: macOS High Sierra (10.13)
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.19.21671 (Git)
Build type: Release
Branch: master
Hash: f05253f882b336f56aae32593faa5676fd5aafdd
Python version: 3.8.2
Qt version: 5.12.5
Coin version: 4.0.0
OCC version: 7.4.0
Locale: C/Default (C)

[OficineRobotica]

If you tested in 0.19 and if others can reproduce: yes.
Here I cannot reproduce.

You made me think about it but I remember to always have had this problem with the old laptop also. This one recognizes gestures but the old one was the simple old style touchpad with only tap and 2 fingers scroll. I don't think this is a touchpad settings issue but more of a OS dependent one as I see that you are using macos.

phpBB [video]

Please note in the video one aspect that I cannot record. When rotating the view with the SHIFT+double tap and drag, the selecting happens as soon as I lift the finger from the touchpad but the keyboard indicator reports the left click still pressed. It turns to normal when I release the SHIFT also. As you can see in the video the random selecting doesn't happen anymore with the gesture navigation where I don't need to press SHIFT for rotation but only the doubletap.

Can somebody else test this to understand if it is a FC problem or a touchpad settings one?

Code: Select all

OS: KDE neon User Edition 5.19 (KDE//usr/share/xsessions/plasma)
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.19.21775 (Git) AppImage
Build type: Release
Branch: master
Hash: 1f741aa511e898849e46ed14515fce416fe32acb
Python version: 3.8.2
Qt version: 5.12.5
Coin version: 4.0.0
OCC version: 7.4.0
Locale: English/United States (en_US)

[OficineRobotica]

Can somebody else on linux test this and reproduce so that we can make a bug report? Thank you

[DeepSOIC]

I can reproduce it on Windows. It happens when I rotate with Shift+LMB and move. If I use Alt and move, no selection changes.

Fixing it probably isn't a breeze. This will need similar logic as Gesture, accumulating events and refiring then if LMB is released but wasn't moved. It isn't impossible, but I would then like to reimplement the style with a state machine, which is something I don't really want to dive into right now.

OS: Windows 10 (10.0)
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.19.18234 (Git)
Build type: Release
Branch: master
Hash: 3af5d97e9b2a60823815f662aba25422c4bc45bb
Python version: 3.6.8
Qt version: 5.12.1
Coin version: 4.0.0a
OCC version: 7.3.0
Locale: Russian/Russia (ru_RU)

[OficineRobotica]

I can reproduce it on Windows. It happens when I rotate with Shift+LMB and move. If I use Alt and move, no selection changes.

Thank you for looking into this. I'll create a bug report.

Fixing it probably isn't a breeze. This will need similar logic as Gesture, accumulating events and refiring then if LMB is released but wasn't moved. It isn't impossible, but I would then like to reimplement the style with a state machine, which is something I don't really want to dive into right now.

Using the ALT accelerator is good enough for me at the moment. The problem is that ALT+click is used on many linux window managers to move the whole application window and new users with laptops will probably switch to "touchpad navigation" hitting the same annoyance. Perhaps this should be tackled some time in the future.
In the mean time changing the window manager accelerator to META and using alt instead of shift for rotating the view works well on linux also.