[Feature Request] Scrolling up and down using the mouse scroll wheel

[vosian]

Instead of using it to zoom in and out, I'd prefer to be able to map that to ctrl+scrollwheel and use scrollwheel to pan the image up and down.

[diemmarkus]

sorry, but the wheel functions are pretty crowded already (CTRL+wheel switches between images) - so I guess we won't add this feature...

[aspiers]

@diemmarkus please could you reconsider your position based on the following facts?

1. Almost all users will expect the scroll wheel to scroll, not zoom. This is the universal convention. That's why it's called a scroll wheel not a zoom wheel ;-)

2. Control+wheel is an extremely common convention for zooming.

3. Shift+wheel is an extremely common convention for horizontal scrolling.

4. The argument "wheel functions are pretty crowded already" doesn't really apply, because there are plenty of modifiers to allow the mouse wheel to perform multiple functions. In addition to Control and Shift, there's Alt, Control+Shift, Control+Alt, Shift+Alt, and even Control+Shift+Alt.

No single mapping will make all users happy, therefore the most logical thing to do is to:

1. conform with the universal conventions on mouse wheel bindings listed above, and

2. make them all configurable so that users can always set it up the way they prefer.

[vosian]

that's right, personally I'm happy even if these settings aren't made default, just being able to bind it would be more than enough

[diemmarkus]

Hi @aspiers,

I think what users expect is heavily depending on the OS they are using (nomacs tries to bridge that). When thinking about user experience extremely common is not what you want in general. For example placing the back button at the top left corner is extremely common - still it's not a good practice since this corner is hard to reach.

Almost all users will expect the scroll wheel to scroll, not zoom. This is the universal convention. That's why it's called a scroll wheel not a zoom wheel ;-)

let's call it mouse wheel : ) - Take a look at Google Maps - it has a pretty similar zoom/pan behavior as nomacs and is used by a lot of users.

conform with the universal conventions on mouse wheel bindings listed above, and

the thing here is, that it makes sense for text editors etc. to scroll using the mouse wheel since their content is mostly vertical. However for image viewers this is not the case (the mouse wheel would do nothing if the image fits the window). Most image viewers I know (including IrfanView, Windows Photo Viewer, ...) use the mouse wheel for switching between images. This behavior can be configured in nomacs too.

best, markus

[vosian]

I'm sorry, but if I found this could be configured from nomacs I wouldn't have opened this issue. Where's the option? I found the option to have the scroll wheel NOT zoom, and despite zoom in and zoom out being in keyboard shorcut, I can't map it to ctrl+scroll as it simply doesn't seem to "grab" the scrolling event.

[diemmarkus]

sorry, that was misleading. When I wrote

This behavior can be configured in nomacs too.

I meant the option to switch between images with the mouse wheel in stead of zooming. The behavior you requested (panning using the wheel) is not configurable in nomacs (yet : ).

[aspiers]

Thanks both for the good discussion.

@diemmarkus commented on 8 Aug 2018, 15:33 BST:

The behavior you requested (panning using the wheel) is not configurable in nomacs (yet : ).

This "yet" sounds more encouraging - I like it ;-)

Our discussion re-affirms my original assertion:

No single mapping will make all users happy

so I'd like to re-iterate:

therefore the most logical thing to do is to:

[...]

• make them all configurable so that users can always set it up the way they prefer.

In almost every other way nomacs is awesome, but the lack of convenient panning (see also #241 and #242) is a deal-breaker feature for me.

[diemmarkus]

I'll keep you posted when we have progress here...

In almost every other way nomacs is awesome,

thanks : )

[aspiers]

@diemmarkus commented on 9 Aug 2018, 12:34 BST:

I'll keep you posted when we have progress here...

I appreciate it, thanks!

[mdmawat]

Disabling "Mouse Wheel Zooms" doesn't have Ctrl+wheel work on zooming and I finally found Alt+wheel works. Any way to have zooming functionality switched to Ctrl+wheel?

[honza-zidek]

For me this issue is clearly a showstopper. I switched to nomacs from Irfanview (licensing issue, not functional) and am considering to stop using nomacs at all. This ignoring all the conventions and not allowing the users to configure the mouse behaviour themselves makes nomacs almost unusable. Also the lack of horizontal and vertical scrollbar makes the life much harder. You won't make a software great by making it counter-intuitive and standing against the common ways.

[diemmarkus]

Also the lack of horizontal and vertical scrollbar makes the life much harder.

you can enable scrollbars in Settings > General.

You won't make a software great by making it counter-intuitive and standing against the common ways.

thanks - now I know...

[honza-zidek]

Also the lack of horizontal and vertical scrollbar makes the life much harder.

you can enable scrollbars in Settings > General.

Well, finally I found it in Settings > Display, not in Settings > General, but thanks for the hint that such an option exists. I would not expect anything like this to be by default off.

You won't make a software great by making it counter-intuitive and standing against the common ways.

thanks - now I know...

Well, based on the feedback you have from the users of your program you might be less sarcastic and more thoughtful. Anyway, it's your program, your users and your decision, so you may do with us whatever you please. We use it for free, so we should just shut up and be grateful to The Creator.

[dabalciunas]

For me this issue is clearly a showstopper. I switched to nomacs from Irfanview (licensing issue, not functional) and am considering to stop using nomacs at all. This ignoring all the conventions and not allowing the users to configure the mouse behaviour themselves makes nomacs almost unusable. Also the lack of horizontal and vertical scrollbar makes the life much harder. You won't make a software great by making it counter-intuitive and standing against the common ways.

I have to agree with him, you guys are really missing the point here. If the default behavior of nomacs is like you suggest us to use, no problem at all. But you should at least provide the users a way to customize nomacs for setting up the "conventional" shortcuts behavior, which is offered by so many tools in the market. I'm a software developer as you guys, and I had to learn this lesson too.

[supersexy]

Can confirm that first experience of nomacs made me conclude "not usable" because of not finding a way to pan the picture neither by keyboard or by mouse and not finding any hint about keyboard shortcuts and no way to configure these absolutely basic functions.

It is an example for a good software that unfortunately fails in delivering totally expected very basic function and makes it very hard to try it a second time because the "very basic" category does not work as expected.

It inearl feels like you added an anti-feature to the software on urpose to make people avoid using it, it is something where people get crazy asking "how can a developer not understand that?".

Please test other image viewers and you will see that it usually is very easy to pan / navigate / scroll etc. - these set of functions should be undertandable for users without even thinking about it. But this happens because developers go deep into these details, so should you.

Please learn from these comments, as I still see lots of potential.

[honza-zidek]

Can confirm that first experience of nomacs made me conclude "not usable" because of not finding a way to pan the picture neither by keyboard or by mouse and not finding any hint about keyboard shortcuts and no way to configure these absolutely basic functions.

It is an example for a good software that unfortunately fails in delivering totally expected very basic function and makes it very hard to try it a second time because the "very basic" category does not work as expected.

It nearly feels like you added an anti-feature to the software on purpose to make people avoid using it, it is something where people get crazy asking "how can a developer not understand that?".

Please test other image viewers and you will see that it usually is very easy to pan / navigate / scroll etc. - these set of functions should be undertandable for users without even thinking about it. But this happens because developers go deep into these details, so should you.

Please learn from these comments, as I still see lots of potential.

I totally agree with you. I'm afraid it's a common problem of opensource software made by programmers for themselves and not with the regard of the users. Big potential lost in user-unfriendly GUI. On the other side of the spectrum there are big corporations, where product managers force the programmer to produce software which technically is crap, but is created for users. It's difficult to decide who is worse - the stubborn technician ("I don't care what other similar software looks like, the way of mine is the best") or the manager ignoring technical issues ("I don't care that the database model is not designed for this particular feature, I simply must have it there").

[developomp]

One more person who agrees with @aspiers

[Tromick]

I installed Irfanview in 2009 but uninstalled it after 5 min due of it wouldn't allow to change shorcuts. I installed it after 11 years, people are begging for this option and still no user-friendly. No wonder it's always criticized by program editors. Also it doesn't show images sharp if it is windowed mode, my screenshot's texts were so blurry in windowed mode. Probably they will listen users in 2030 or more far future.

[honza-zidek]

@Tromick do you really mean Irfanview?

[diemmarkus]

I am pretty sure that nomacs did not exist in 2009 : )

[Tromick]

I am pretty sure that nomacs did not exist in 2009 : )

Nomacs is pretty good, i really loved it, thank you. I wish that doesn't playing GIF's faster. This is why i installed Irfanview back but it was horrible experience same as in 2009.

[vosian]

might have something to do with the delay between frames, a lot of gifs are set to 0, which would make the gif play instantly, so it's up to the client to set its own delay. Basically if the gif has delay 0 it's the problem of the image.

[lukasbloom]

@aspiers +1

[PinkSerenity]

Is there any update on this? I'd like to be able to use simple scrolling to scroll, Ctrl + scroll to zoom, Shift + scroll to scroll horizontally (it isn't important to me since I have a horizontal wheel, but I'm pretty sure it's important to many) and Alt + scroll to switch between images.

My suggestion would be to add an option where you are presented with the four different scroll actions and where you can assign buttons to all of them. E.g:

• Switch between images: None
• Zoom: Ctrl
• Scroll vertically: Alt
• Scroll horizontally: Shift

This would be the default, and I can freely change these settings, disable some actions or maybe even assign multible possible buttons to one action.

Edit: This feature is much needed when it comes to cropping images. Panning moves the cropping area, so I have actually no idea how to scroll to the bottom.

[honza-zidek]

Is there any update on this?

@Tojaw I found the update long time ago. Its name is FastStone Image Viewer :) I am a happy user of this and the nomacs and its stubborn developer can still happily live in his own world of weird mouse controls :)

[honza-zidek]

@hced: I think that you are mistaken as for the motivation of the people who spread their programs for free. I believe that they don't do it out of altruism, but they do it simply for fun. If you create something for free which other people use, you do it because you want to change the world, you are the Creator - you form the world in your image. The others don't have to be grateful to you, they just resigned to their own option to participate in the world forming.

Still, be prepared for your users feedback. And you may of course decide to keep doing things your own way, or if you want more people to be happy users of your creation.

I have heard many times various volunteers whining about the ungrateful receivers of their freely and generously offered services, and I always just feel sick about it. Do it for fun, do it for yourself, or stop whining and go and get paid for your work.

The burnout syndrome of the volunteers is just the lack of their understanding why they do what they do.

As for nomacs, I cannot say "I love your program", because I simply don't. Fortunately they are alternatives on the market, as I already wrote I am a happy user of FastStone Image Viewer.

[cjrobe]

I was going to use Nomad to preview images in my workflow in between using graphics editors. The fact that Nomad won't function in any way except counter to every single popular graphics editor makes in a non-starter for me. Uninstalled in two minutes. Shame because the program appears to be quite nice other than this.