[eclipse-dev] Opera/Mozilla style mouse/pen gesture recognition in Eclip

["Chris McLaren" <Chris_McLaren@xxxxxxx>]

As an experiment, I've added to Eclipse support for recognizing mouse
gestures, a feature of Opera and Mozilla fame. This feature will appear in
the next build.

To make a gesture, click and hold the right mouse button in an editor, then
move the mouse according to the following table. Release the button to
complete the gesture and execute the action. An unrecognized gesture (like
a simple right-click) will default to opening the editor's right-click
popup menu. The gesture recognizer should be reasonably forgiving of 'poor
penmanship'.

      RIGHT                   Go forward in the history
      LEFT                    Go backward in the history

      UP                      Save the current file
      UP then LEFT            Save all files

      DOWN                    Close the current file
      DOWN then LEFT          Close all files

      RIGHT then LEFT         Cut the selected text
      RIGHT then UP           Copy the selected text
      RIGHT then DOWN         Paste the selected text

These nine gestures were picked out of my hat for this experiment, but
should response for this feature be positive, I will add support for
plugins to contribute mouse gestures as well as a preference page for users
to 'train' Eclipse to recognize new gestures and assign them to specific
actions (the same set of actions available to key binding customization).

Technical note: Gestures are recognized when clicking within any
AbstractTextEditor. This class is used for editing text and java files,
among others, but you will probably encounter editors for which this
functionality is not currently enabled.

Please comment on this feature, as it was not on the original 2.1 plan.

Thanks,
Chris.