Click, that is….

I’ve been thinking about Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) recently, thanks mostly to the guys from LUGRadio, who interviewed Seth Nickell, one of the GNOME usability guys at RedHat, in their latest episode. I’ve also read an interesting article about setting up a Linux box for a guys Dad; one of the things he said was to disable double-clicking as it was difficult and unintuitive for a brand new computer user. So:

Do you double click? I know that I very rarely do these days - I don’t often _see_ my desktop, and usually just use quicklaunchers and the like. Thoughts to the usual address.

mrBen

My desktop is a collection of shortcuts to folders I use lots, some gdesklets to save me typing “sensors” into an xterm and a couple text files I use as todo lists. These are the only places I double click any more. Mail and Web clients are triggered by XF86 events triggered by my fancy Microsoft keyboard.

Every day I consider moving to a window manager I can control with just the keyboard - I’m rapidly going off the mouse - whos primary use is now ET….

-D

Yeah, double click quite a bit, although if there is an available keyboard shortcut, it is much better.

I don’t double-click anything ever, because I’ve set Nautilus to use single-click for everything. I hate double-clicking

I usually double click, mostly out of habit, cos ive become used to doing it.

I am guilty of the double click - incognito style, but try and use keyboard shortcuts more these days

It’s not so much being “guilty” of double-clicking, it’s whether or not it is useful and usable for new users, and whether or not we have gone away from the ‘Old’ days - I know that my Dad uses single-click icons on his desktop, which was an option from Win98 onwards, IIRC.

Was just curious, really.

I do double-click, though I can’t say how often I really use it; at home I usually use the launchers in my gnome-panel. At work, it’s a Windows world. On Linux or Windows, I prefer to *have* to double-click on things so that I don’t actually open files/programs “accidentally” just by selecting them.

In nautilus, since gnome 2.6, you can actually double-click a folder with the *middle* mouse button to open a new folder window and close the previous one; handy shortcut to prevent a screenful of windows.

Single-click to select, double-click to open. It’s always worked for me.

[...] So here is a collection of random thoughts on that subject: Double-Clicking Following my recent post it was interesting to read peoples comments. I also disabled th [...]

@Aq. “I don’t double-click anything ever, because I’ve set Nautilus to use single-click”

Presumably you never use GTK dialogs then? (which happily ignore the setting in Nautilus).

I also hate double-clicking with a passion, and get really frustrated when double-clicking programmers do not cater for click settings because they are too ignorant to be aware of any other click method than their own.

It should also be noted that Microsoft own the patent on double-clicking.