Hi David:
david lawson (JIC) wrote:
Dear All,
Sorry for the slightly off-topic subject.
We have recently bought a few iMacs for crystallography. I'm not
keen on
the supplied "mighty mouse"
May I have them?
so I have switched to using a microsoft
3-button wheel mouse. I would like to configure it so that it
behaves as
it would with other unix systems such as RH Linux.
You managed to use "Microsoft", "behaved" and "Linux" (albeit RH)
all in
one sentence without a hint of irony.
i.e.
(1) double-clicking with LH button on a file name selects ALL of
the
file name, not just up to the first full stop.
Although your choice of Microsoft products shows dedication to a
company
with a firm reputation for placing the customizability needs of its
customers ahead of its own desire to make profits, the first thing
to
realize is that you should never ever ever install their drivers.
Ever. So
if you did, take them out, now, and reboot. I'll wait. It is still
early
Sunday morning here.
(2) clicking the scroll wheel pastes the selected text AND it can
be
done multiple times without re-selecting.
When you've gotten rid of the drivers, this should now work. In
Apple's
Terminal program (as of 10.5) and iTerm (as of 1215), you just set
the
preference to do middle-button-paste and left-button select, and
Blair's
your uncle. Unfortunately, in pretty much every other application I
can
think of on OS X, this, sadly, does not work, and there is nothing
Steve
Gates will let you do about it.
(2) I would like these functions to work in terminal windows, the
ccp4i
gui and web pages (and probably a few other things I haven't
thought of
yet!) AND be able to transfer the selected text between
applications.
I'd like to be at my ideal high-school weight, be paid more than a
postdoc, and, well ... Getting the OS X gui to play nice with X11
is
sometimes challenging. With the exception of Terminal and iTerm,
you have
to explicitly put stuff in the copy/paste buffer (command-C) before
it is
in the system clipboard. Then you can paste to X11 programs with a
middle-button click, but this only works if you uninstalled that
viral
driver. Going from X11 to aqua programs requires selecting the text
in the
usual X11 manner but explicitly issuing the paste command (command-
p). If
you are using KDE X11 applications, you are really in for headaches.
To get whole-string selection in iTerm or Terminal, there is a
preference
setting that allows you to input which characters you want to have
considered parts of a "word" for click-to-select purposes.
Unfortunately,
pretty much every other application lacks this customizability, and
I know
of no system-wide preference setting that would enable you to do
this
globally.
Aqua simply behaves by slightly different rules. Although I am a
slobbering OS X fan, this lack of customizability to me, as well as
a lack
of focus-follows-mouse, it a negative.
If you really need the canonical linux behavior, you can install
gnome,
xfce4, KDE, enlightenment, or any number of other window managers
via
fink. I've found KDE buggy and the XFCE4 is way out of date.
Gnome is
probably the best bet, and there is a major effort now to bring it
completely up to date in fink.
I have installed the microsoft intellipoint drivers that seem to
give
more control over configuring the various buttons through "system
preferences", but I still can't get what I want.
Therein lies the problem, I am afraid. OS X will behave better using
the
default settings. It may be possible to tinker around with the
driver,
including separate settings in X11, to recover canonical behavior,
but for
purposes of sanity, uninstall them first, get everything working as
best
as possible, verify middle-button-paste works in X11, verify X11
coot and
pymol do the right thing, and then if you need additional
functionality,
reinstall the drivers, verify things like coot and pymol still use
the
middle button correctly, or adjust until they do, and only then try
customizing.
Best of luck!
Bill
Any help would be much appreciated.
Many thanks
Dave Lawson
-------------------------------
Dr. David M. Lawson
Biological Chemistry Dept.,
John Innes Centre,
Norwich,
NR4 7UH, UK.
Tel: +44-(0)1603-450725
Fax: +44-(0)1603-450018
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Web: http://www.jic.bbsrc.ac.uk/staff/david-lawson/index.htm
