fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse -> fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse/
True X-Mouse Gizmo for Windows Unsurpassably liberating experience of X11-ish copy'n'paste on Windows X11 is better for fingers. Have you ever paid attention to striking difference in the thickness of f orefingers in X11/Unix and MS Windows users, respectively? The latter ha ve much more muscular forefingers that often suffer from chronic aches i n their joints. They also much more often develop mouse arm, pain in the neck and shoulders, and other troubles known as Repetitive Stress Syndr ome and associated with excessive usage of a pointing device. The explanation is simple: all X11 users benefit from the fact that no s ignificant effort is needed to place a selected chunk of text into the clipboard and to fetch it from there. Moreover, different applications require different pr ocedures. For example, to simply copy the selected piece of text to the clipboard, you may need to - choose Edit -> Copy from the menu - press a button with two pieces of paper on it - use keyboard shortcuts Ctrl-Insert or Ctrl-C. How do we paste the content s of the clipboard into an X-application? In yet more ways than they copy: - choose Edit -> Paste from the menu - press a button with a piece of paper on a clipboard - press a button with a brush - press a button with a bottle of glue - Shift-Insert, Ctrl-V or Ctrl-P and so on. Over the years Microsoft (being under the user community pressure) has un dertaken some half-hearted attempts to bring the fewer-clicks functional ity to Windows.
PowerToys f or Windows XP for XP version) goes only about one fifth of the way. Inde ed, to an average X11-user the expression "X-Mouse" means the following: 1 Keyboard focus follows mouse pointer instantly (the only one that can be achieved with TweakUI, annoyingly enough accompanied by the "quality" to raise the window upon click). All of the above is what this "True X-Mouse Gizmo" is about:-) Recommended usage.
However, it has not been tested on 98/Me as thoroughly as on 2000/XP. Usage is free, but only those who have sent a postcard^ are entitled f or support:-) Postcards with a view over your home-town or other local s ight signed with encouraging words and your E-mail address are to be sen t to Andy Polyakov, c/o Fysikdatorn Fysikgrnd 3 Chalmers University of Technology Gteborg SE-412 96 SWEDEN Employees of Chalmers University of Technology don't have to send a postcard. In order to facilitate text replacement (ie mark, copy, mark elsewhere, paste to replace), a heuristic algorithm to determine when not to perfo rm X11-ish copy is implemented. Namely, when you select a chunk of text in order to replace something else by it, you naturally expect it to be copied to the clipboard. But the next thing you do, when you select the text you want to "write over," you don't expect clipboard content to be zapped upon middle button release! To avoid the latter, you should copy your text in the traditional way, by means of Edit -> Copy, Ctrl-C, etc (an alternative, better way is described in the end of this section). In this case when you select the text to replace right after that, TXMouse notices that the clipboard content has been changed by someone else (yo u), and assumes that this time the selection will not be copied to the c lipboard. After pasting by clicking the middle button, TXMouse is happy to copy things on marking again. This is why a visual feedback is provided, so that you can always know the status of your co py-paste business. Whenever a copy on left button release is about to be performed, a tiny X next to the cursor (as depicted above) appears as s oon as the mouse is moved with the left button depressed. If you don't s ee this X next to the cursor when you click and drag, then no copy will be performed and the content of the clipboard will remain intact. Another thing to look at is an X icon in the system tray.
However, if you have manually copied any content to clipboard, the icon changes as soon as you move the mouse. The X flips and changes its hue, in other words "turns its back on you." This means that copy-on-mark is temporar ily off - until you paste the clipboard content with the middle button c lick (but see even below). Now, what if you are suddenly not happy with the state of your mark-copy affairs? You have started to drag the mouse, and you see that TXMouse is /isn't going to copy what you are marking! Relax, there is an instant wa y to turn copy-on-mark on or off without even lifting your finger from t he left mouse button: a click on the middle button toggles between the t wo modes. If you want to copy what you mark and there is no X next to th e cursor or the X icon in the system tray is showing you its grim back s ide, just click on the middle button, and the cursor, the system tray ic on, and the readyness to copy to clipboard will change in an instant. Or , if you want to mark something for replacement and see the X-ized curso r and the shining red X icon, click on the middle button, and the markin g will not be copied on the left button release. There is no program that is good in all situations (even though TXMouse c omes pretty close to that:-). Some applications have certain semantics f or click-and-drag events and interfering with them the way TXMouse does might have undesirable effects, graphic editors being obvious notable ex ample. X servers for Windows, obviously, do not need this functionality, because it is already available in X11. In short, we want to exempt som e windows from True X-Mouse behaviour. And of course we want to be able to tweak some basic parameters, like button emulation and double-click i ntervals. This is achieved by adding a new key to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive. We al l know that Microsoft officially discourages to touch The Registry, thre atening that your system will go down for ever. The reassurement comes f rom the following facts: * The key is optional.
"RapidClickInterval"=dword:0000014d "TwoButtons"=dword:0 Note that what appears in this particular example is actually not needed - these are the defaults that are hard-coded into TXMouse.
reg and modify it to yo ur liking with any text editor (for example, with Notepad). After that y ou can double-click on the (modified) file and confirm that you want thi s information to be written to the registry. For the new settings to tak e effect, you have to either restart TXMouse or double-click the X icon in the system tray and close the window that pops up. The settings are r e-read on window closing (the purpose of the window itself is discussed below). If set to non-zero value, window auto-raise is enabled (w hich DK hates from the bottom of his heart). Well, because you don't want an awful lot of windows to pop u p on you along the path of your cursor whenever you move your mouse. If you don't enable auto-raise, the only way to make a window front-most is to click on any part of window decoration. This is another quality whic h distinguishes this gizmo. TXMouse prevents windows from raising when y ou click inside them! Absolutely great if you have three of four partial ly overlapping windows and want to work with them, yet keep the current Z-order. This is very useful feature for the poor bastards who are force d to use MS Excel at work, as the only way to get anything done in Excel normally giant window is to click somewhere. But how about sinking windows down to the bottom of d esktop? You still can access window menus that are normall y opened by a right-click on the title bar. This can be achieved by the means of a "long right-click" (clicking-holding-letting go). RapidClickI nterval is the amount of milliseconds (hexadecimal) that you have to hol d down the right button before you let it go in order to access the titl e bar menu instead of sinking the window. The default hexadecimal 0x14D is 333 ms which works pretty well in most situations. In terms of Win32 programming interface, each window is of a certain class. Without going into detail about what these classes ( or programming interfaces) are, let us see how we can find out what clas s a particular window belongs to. If you double-click on the X icon in t he system tray, True X-Mouse Tracking ...
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