[mcclim-devel] newbie niggles and whines.

[David Golden]

I played briefly with McCLIM (in CMUCL on linux) over the holidays, and 
now I have a list of niggles and whines.  These are meant as 
constructive minor first-impressions criticisms, I realise fully things 
are still being actively developed! - McCLIM is generally quite cool.

 I don't want to clutter the bug list page with them as several are 
vague and not necessarily bugs, but because I start work again tomorrow 
and probably won't have time to follow any up until next xmas or 
something, here follows brain dump for others to pick up on, or not:

1. Listener (shows symptoms anyway, problem may lie deeper):  Super-key 
handling is broken? super key presses are detected, but any mouse 
movement or button press first seems to cancel the super key, thus 
making it impossible to use e.g. s-L

Xev shows X isn't at fault (I think) - can anyone confirm?

2. Listener: Tab key  Completion.   Completes after tab when you enter 
two or more characters, but puts in some sort of a  "[]" 
nonprinting-character sign after one?   Similarly, space-key completion 
doesn't after one character, only completes after two?  Presumably this 
behaviour is a bug rather than a feature.

3. Listener: Completion - showing possibilities? like bash, or just by 
dropping down a keyboard-navigable variant of the right click menu?

4. Listener: deletion on the command line.  Probably a feature that's 
coming just not implemented. Once the listener displays the e.g. "Show 
Class Subclasses (class)" , you can't "go back" with the backspace key 
anymore - it just outputs "(class)" again.

5. Listener: ability to "press enter" with the mouse? Huh? you say - 
well, it's like this - the last thing I select for a one-arg command is 
often something I click with the mouse (or in my case stylus, 
actually...).   - maybe the current command line should be clickable to 
perform the action if it becomes valid, like previous command lines are 
once they're done once.  While this might be computationally somewhat 
expensive, people have absurdly fast computers these days.

6. (whine) Text Selection. Yes, I realise it's a brand-new feature. But 
wouldn't it be nicer to use click v.s. drag discrimination rather than 
the unusual shift-key? i.e. if the mouse moves more than 10 pixels
over the text while the LMB is down, assume it's a highlight action
rather than a click action? (Of course, there's also drag-drop to worry 
about).

7. (wishlist note)  Accessibility or at least keyboard gadget 
navigation...

8. (whine/opinion) Dialogs. "exit" and "abort" to me don't seem strongly 
differentiated enough - exit really doesn't say to me "exit and use 
these values".  Yes, they're in the spec as the defaults (which is 
probably enough to decide it, I guess...), but  e.g. "Accept" (or 
"Okay" or "Use") / "Cancel" would be so much more in-line with modern 
usage.   

9.  Look-and-feel:  Antialiased fonts on linux by default.  Yes, XRENDER 
etc. lowlevel support belongs in clx distribution, not McCLIM - but if 
it is available, McCLIM should really default to it at this stage on 
linux, IMHO.  Again, this is probably planned, but hey.