From don@brillig.umd.edu Mon Jan 12 23:15:26 1987
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 86 03:13:15 EST
From: Don Hopkins <don@brillig.umd.edu>
To: mark@brillig.umd.edu, don@brillig.umd.edu
Subject: getting more information out of your mouse

When traversing menus, after selecting a submenu with a mouse button
down, move, mouse button up sequence, why require choices from the
next menu to be choosen with the same button and key combination as
the last menu? Why not use this information? Upon releasing the button
to choose from the first menu, a preliminary menu could pop up,
layered, maybe, with each layer corresponding to the menu you will
invoke with with the correspinding key. (with the left key outside,
and right most in the center, maybe.) You could then see where you
could go from there, press the appropriate button for the appropriate
catagory, and know which direction to move off into, before you did
it. Abort by clicking down and up without moving, as usual. Shift keys
could provide additional information, serving as adjectives. This is a
way to layer the pie menus as deep as you have mouse buttons, without
consuming the radius information, so it can still be used to modify
the selection, also. It might be slick to not bother drawing the
unlayered submenu after getting the mouse down event to choose a
submenu if it looks like you're going to make a quick choice, i.e. if
the mouse down event occurs in a different place than the last mouse
up, and the mouse is traveling in the direction between the last mouse
up and the this mouse down. In that case it could wait a small ammount
of time for a mouse up event, while the mouse was traveling in the
appropriate direction, and if no mouse up is received in that time, or
the direction changes, then draw the single layer pie menu
corresponding to the mouse button pressed down, at the location of
that mouse down event. Can you say "M-x electric-pie-menu-mode"?

	-Don