The scroll wheel desktop flipping direction (up=left) is counterintuitive to a large group of people, who consider UP an INCREMENT. as desktop 1 is a lower number than 2, they would prefer that an UP scroll wheel event should result in the desktop being changed to the RIGHT. This is a fundamental breakpoint where people cannot get used to an interface property. I hope you guys can consider it seriously. I love xfce4 but after using it since ages this is still one of the things that confuse me! I would most definately swap the behaviour if I could, thus... please make it swappable. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
*** Bug 649 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
(In reply to comment #0) > The scroll wheel desktop flipping direction (up=left) is counterintuitive to a > large group of people, who consider UP an INCREMENT. as desktop 1 is a lower > number than 2, they would prefer that an UP scroll wheel event should result in > the desktop being changed to the RIGHT. The intuition behind down -> right and up -> left is mostly based on reading and on vertical scroll wheel behavior. In the vertical domain, scroll up and scroll down of course go up and down, but since we read from top to bottom, it can also be viewed as "go forward" and "go backwards" (in the current document). There has always been a set of (mostly novice) people who have found scroll wheel behavior to be odd because the document itself scrolls upwards as you scroll downwards, but once they understand that your document window is more of a viewport than the document itself, they start to grasp it. When extended to the horizontal scroll bar, the default GTK behavior (for my locale at least; i'm not sure if its locale dependent) is to scroll to the right on scroll down and to the left on scroll up. For readers of languages that flow left to right, this does *not* break the spatial paradigm described above, and, indeed, if you lined up the desktops horizontally (left to right) starting from 1 and vertically starting from 1, the vertical scrolling paradigm does not change. For your example, it does, or: your example would mean scrolling down on vertically arranged desktops to move spatially upwards (following numbers in decreasing order upwards), which is counterintuitive to normal scroll wheel behavior. Most people think spatially with the desktop metaphor (since it *is* spatial), and not numerically, but since other wm's handle desktop scrolling in the way you suggest I don't think that allowing this to be configurable is too damaging.
That's probably the best explanation I've heard so far. I think the only bug here is that we're probably not reversing the scroll direction if the text direction is GTK_TEXT_DIRECTION_RTL. Otherwise I think a pref here is inconsistent and pref-bloat. It would be a good idea to check if horizontal scrolling usually does reverse for right-to-left locales.
(In reply to comment #3) > That's probably the best explanation I've heard so far. I think the only bug > here is that we're probably not reversing the scroll direction if the text > direction is GTK_TEXT_DIRECTION_RTL. Otherwise I think a pref here is > inconsistent and pref-bloat. It would be a good idea to check if horizontal > scrolling usually does reverse for right-to-left locales. Any right-to-left locales in the vincity???
AFAIK, this is the default behavior on many desktop environments. I'm closing this bug since the last (real) comment was made in 2005, so I'm guessing there isn't much demand for it... -H-
Fot those who want this functionality: See http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3361