Middle click to kill workspace (in overview) should be optional

[hanaral]

Problem

When testing the gestures branch I've noticed how often I swipe up, lift my fingers off, and then place them back down on the touchpad. As you can probably guess, it is annoying to loose all the apps in a workspace because of a shortcut you didn't know about.

Proposal

Just make it a toggle in the new gestures panel under 'mouse and touchpad' in settings

[ibrahimrahman]

Making it a toggle is still a better solution than removing it altogether as suggested in #977, which would take away functionality from mouse users for whom gestures are of little use. I personally use the middle click in workspace overview a lot and hope that it would stay.

Something else that could be done is making mouse clicks register after the mouse button has been released. This way the app will not close unless you lift your fingers without moving them at all.

IIRC, Windows, ~~unlike elementary~~[In some places elementary does this (apps) and in some places it doesn't (wingpanel, middle-click action)], doesn't take any action until the mouse button is released. On button press, it just gives a visual feedback relating to what was clicked. I think this is a much more pleasant approach as it gives an impression of something actually being pressed, while also giving users a chance to rectify a miss-click

[danirabbit]

I haven't looked at the code yet, but yeah if it's activating on press instead of on release that's an issue

If that doesn't resolve it, we should probably make sure that we're only listening to mouse events and ignoring three finger taps

[cassidyjames]

@danrabbit I don't know what the proper solution is here to ensure things don't conflict, but I personally use three-finger tap to close apps all the time; it would be super frustrating to lose that. I guess this is where I prefer four fingers for workspace gestures so there's less of a possibility of a conflict.

It might be non-ideal, but I wonder if we can only respond to a three-finger physical click on touchpads, and just ignore the tap-to-click if we have to ignore something. That would mean we retain the ability to three-finger close apps, but you just have to physically click down on a touchpad instead of accidentally tapping when trying to do a gesture.

[hanaral]

@danrabbit I don't know what the proper solution is here to ensure things don't conflict, but I personally use three-finger tap to close apps all the time; it would be super frustrating to lose that. I guess this is where I prefer four fingers for workspace gestures so there's less of a possibility of a conflict. ...

@cassidyjames My ThinkPad’s touchpad isn’t terribly accurate, so I some times kill my entire workspace by accident despite only having 4 finger gestures like you.

[cassidyjames]

Ah yeah I forgot middle-click to close a workspace was a thing in addition to closing windows. Yeah I think that's maybe more problematic. I don't ever close entire workspaces on purpose. 😅

[Fatih20]

Yeah so in reference to the issue 140 in triage, it's obvious that this issue have also made three-finger gestures IMO unusable. If I may humbly chime in, the solution to that particular problem may be a time delay between the three-finger gesture finishing and the user being able to close the window using the three-finger click.

But more importantly regarding the functionality of this middle click to close window and workspaces, feel free to correct me for being ignorant if there are prompts and whatnot telling the user that this feature exist, but frankly I think this feature is poorly informed to the user as this is the first time I've ever known about the feature even though I've used elementary in both my laptop and desktop for nearly 3 years now.

[Freemason-12]

This issue is there for 2 years. Will it be resolved soon? It's one of the main dealbreakers for me not to use elementary

[danirabbit]

I think we can probably consider this closed after #1560. It's now much much harder to accidentally trigger a close. I can't reproduce the issue as described by OP any longer and I tried to reproduce with some really sloppy movements and couldn't trigger an accidental close