From: Carlos Simmerling (carlos.simmerling_at_gmail.com)
Date: Wed Jun 25 2014 - 11:42:32 CDT

Hi John,
that sounds fine. I don't have any favorite tools that we'd want to mimic,
but a button combination to switch the mouse to translate would help a lot.
I really using like the mouse wheel for scaling- something like that for
translating...

I'll look into Josh's suggesting of remapping a gaming mouse. What I do now
is hover on the keyboard like he suggested, I'm just trying to get away
from that if possible (especially for group discussions where we can easily
pass a wireless mouse around).
carlos

On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 12:33 PM, John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:

> Hi guys,
> At present, there isn't a VMD "mouse chord" mode that would allow
> these kinds of manipulations without the mode switching, but I could
> look into adding one. There are minor challenges implementing this across
> all of the windowing systems, but it is doable with appropriate time spent.
>
> One question I would ask is what mouse chords people would prefer as a way
> of doing "translate while in rotate mode", or "rotate while in translate
> mode",
> etc?
>
> Charles Schwieters has an alternative mouse input scheme implemented in
> VMD-XPLOR, which is a slightly modified version of VMD. For some time
> I've wanted to unify his custom mouse input scheme with the standard VMD
> mouse input scheme, perhaps allowing users to choose their favorite mouse
> input scheme from a menu, for example. This would allow VMD to mimick
> the mouse input schemes used by other tools, which may make it more
> user friendly for people that make heavy use of other visualization tools
> where they've grown accustomed to a different mouse input style.
>
> If people have favorite mouse input schemes, I'd be happy to hear them
> and to consider implementing them in a future rev.
>
> Cheers,
> John Stone
> vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
>
> On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 11:49:48AM -0400, Josh Vermaas wrote:
> > If you had a "gaming" mouse with side buttons, I think its doable, as
> > those buttons can be mapped to keys easily and simulate hitting r and
> t.
> > Most of the people in lab use one hand on their mouse, and the other
> > hovering over the r & t keys if they are doing rotations +
> translations.
> > -Josh Vermaas
> >
> > On 6/25/14, 10:30 AM, Carlos Simmerling wrote:
> >
> > Thanks - I do know about these and it's what I do now. It just slows
> > things down to have to go to the keyboard all the time. A button
> > combination would be much more convenient...
> >
> > On Jun 24, 2014 4:37 PM, "Ajasja Ljubetic" <
> ajasja.ljubetic_at_gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> > There are keyboard shortcuts "r" for rotate and "t" for translate,
> > that make switching very easy & painless for me. Does that also
> help
> > with your use case?
> > Regards,
> > Ajasja
> >
> > On 24 June 2014 20:17, Carlos Simmerling <
> carlos.simmerling_at_gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > hi all- is there any way to use a combination of mouse buttons
> to
> > translate while staying in rotate mode for the mouse? it's
> > inconvenient when navigating a molecule to have to keep switch
> modes
> > if you just want to shift the view a little but maintain rotate
> > mode.
> > thanks
>
> --
> NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
> Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
> University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
> http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/ Phone: 217-244-3349
> http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/
>