[iPAQ] xstroke as pie menu (was: UWM -- the unnamed window manager)

On Jan 4, Russ Nelson wrote:
> What's nice about pie menus, though, is that they are self-prompting.
> If you don't have the menu structure memorized, you can just pop up a
> menu and actually read it.
>
> xstroke could be a little more helpful in this regard by recognizing a
> pause in a stroke, and (somehow???) letting the user know which glyphs
> are available by continuing the stroke up, down, left, and right.
> Maybe it could draw some text above, below, left, and right of the
> current pointer?

Yup. I've been thinking of doing something like this for quite some
time. It might be somewhat useful for prompting for characters, but I
think it could be extremely useful for program launching.

Incremental prompting for stroke recognition should work where pie
menus fail, (ie. there would be no artificial limits on menu selection
speed due to window mapping delays, etc.).

The current, (grid-based), recognizer that xstroke uses is not too
amenable to determining a list of possible stroke completions, (the
bounding-box it needs is not available until the stroke is
complete). In CVS, xstroke has a new work-in-progress direction-based
recognition engine that should make this quite feasible. It's not
quite as reliable as the grid-based thing yet, but it is starting to
show promise.

So, I am working toward this. Help and suggestions are welcome as
always.

-Carl
Received on Fri Jan 4 08:26:01 2002