VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Jun 25 2014 - 11:33:15 CDT

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/