Left Sided Windows Scrollbars? 255
Skin and Blister asks: "Years ago mouse manufacturers realized that not everyone is right handed and (thankfully) created the option of reversing the mouse buttons to accommodate left handed users. Now that laptops (and obviously tablets) have integrated touch technology, the new challenge for south paws is to use a stylus in the left hand to manipulate a scroll bar on the right side of an open window. Does anyone know if there is a way to move scroll bars to the left side of a window in Microsoft Windows XP Pro?"
That's EASY! (Score:5, Funny)
As a lefty, I experience these sorts of problems on a daily basis. Spiral notebooks are a pain, scissors are impossible, and I worry about my efficiency on my Nintendo DS. I lose a substancial number of Bells every day in Animal Crossing. Such a waste!
Those little things no righty ever thinks about. Heck, grab your favorite pencil or pen, hold it in your right hand, and read the markings on the pencil. If they're right side up, you've got yourself a right handed pen. Switch to the left side, and the letters are upside down! How disorienting.
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Re:That's EASY! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:That's EASY! (Score:5, Funny)
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lol!
That may go down as one of the great aphorisms, like "red sky at night, sailor's delight".
I'll say it to myself often, so as not to forget:
"right for navigation, left for stimulation"
"right for navigation, left for stimulation"
:)
Spiral Notebooks? (Score:3, Informative)
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But the OP isn't whining about a mouse; [s]he is whining about a touchscreen. So it's not just a convenience,
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For example, people who drive and smoke will often light the cigarette with their natural hand while steering with their "off" hand.
As
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xterity, for the dextrals and sinistrals.
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They say most people hold their children with their left arm because we naturally want the baby to hear our heartbeat. What a load of crap. We hold hour children with our left arms because we're using our right hand for other things.
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Re:That's EASY! (Score:5, Funny)
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Some people are weird.
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Re:That's EASY! (Score:5, Informative)
per the Question:
Use FireFox for your browser:
http://geckotip.mozdev.org/index.html [mozdev.org]
For your Palm (well, your computer kind):
http://handheld.softpedia.com/get/System-Utilitie
Layne
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Start with something like this: http://www.codeproject.com/win32/overrideparams.a
Then, override the creation of anything of class "Scrollbar" to be at position 0 instead of position X.
Just some ideas.
Layne
Re:That's EASY! (Score:5, Funny)
Right handed washing up liquid (Score:2)
e.g.
http://www.geofftech.co.uk/50pence/photos/fairy_li quid.jpg [geofftech.co.uk]
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Don't make life more complicated than it has to be.
The DS and the Left Handed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Sharpen the other end
Saw the original point square
Presto Hey
a left handed pencil
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Uh, mine are kind of symmetric, aren't yours? Oh, the helix might be right or left handed, but I don't even know which och those is to be preferred.
I heard someone say that cars with the driver's seat on the left are more suited for left handed drivers since you can keep your strong hand on the wheel when shifting. (You don't drive a slushie, do you?) If you live in a place where they drive on the left side of the road -- my condolences.
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And then you get those terrible stadium-style desks, with the arm rest on the right side, so you have to support your elbow for an entire lecture, or leave your elbow jutting embarassingl
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The solution is actually really simple. Just learn to write upside down.
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It's never been a problem for me.
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Sure (Score:2, Insightful)
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Turn the laptop upside down... (Score:2, Informative)
!em rof skroW
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It can be done, (Score:2)
Not just scrollbars... (Score:2)
Natural Market for a new distro. (Score:5, Funny)
Not very intuitive... (Score:4, Insightful)
A left-sided scrollbar would require you to constantly drag the mouse back over the top of your working area, despite the fact the cursor is more likely to remain present on the right side of the screen when not being actively used for editing. This is also why you often see tool palettes placed on the left side of a working area, since you are likely going to be very near whatever in your work area required a tool change.
A similarly confusing configuration would be to have your application menus appear at the bottom of the screen and scrolling upward to select the option you need.
Not very intuitive...FOR YOU (Score:2)
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Which planet are you from? (-: (Score:3, Informative)
WRT handedness-sensitive PDAs, hain't knowingly seen one yet.
Handing a mouse is easy, just ask for some weird combination (Ctrl-Alt-Button for example, and wait for the cursing from 'Doze users
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You do know you can simply move the 'task bar' to any side of the screen you want?
I just moved mine to the top. I think I might keep it there. It does make more sense...
NeXT did it! (Score:2)
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Wheel mice and isn't it already left handed (Score:2)
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Left handed is relevant for mouse, not gui (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Left handed is relevant for mouse, not gui (Score:5, Insightful)
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One southpaw's advice (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:One southpaw's advice (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course some of those bastards know this. That's why they add the option to swap the mouse buttons around. It's all evil conspiracy to mess with our heads and take away our advantage.
Oz
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BINGO. My computer has a mouse on the right side and there's a stylus and tablet on the left. When I'm doing graphics work - which is a fair amount of the time - I hold the mouse in one hand and the stylus in the other. It's nice to be able to alternate between the two as well, because I have carpal tunne
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Oh the power I would wield. The power.
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Handedness isn't strict (Score:2)
I think most people can learn to use either hand to do stuff. It's just not worth the trouble for most.
Most people's brains are asymmetric and tend to specialize, so even though a person is apparently right handed and they use the right hand exclusively for writing, they may still prefer to use their left hand for rubbing/scratchi
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You have a good point!
The home pgup pgdown arrow keys and numeric keypad should be moved to the left!!
I cant wait to debug a lefty's computer as a righty.... hitting ENTER on the left. The left pinky is so underused.
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Run Plan 9! (Score:2)
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Right-to-Left (Score:2)
If you are using a Right-To-Left language, Windows will reverse most of this stuff for you.
Of course, this includes menus, windows... everything mirrored.
It's all or nothing.
Right-to-left languages can do it (Score:4, Interesting)
Your question has nothing to do with lefties. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Your question has nothing to do with lefties. (Score:4, Insightful)
The mouse scroll wheel was a step in the right direction but the implementation sucks there too. It should scroll continuously instead of clicking by lines, it should control the thing under the mouse instead of having its own weird focus rules (again Windows stands alone here), and pushing the wheel button should give scrolling control directly to the mouse Y-axis instead of that weirdo autoscroll thing.
Excellent idea! (Score:2)
This is an excellent idea!!! It should work like an analog stick: the further you turn it, the faster the page scrolls. And when you let go of it, it returns to neutral position and stops scrolling. The physical appearance of the wheel should remain the same, though.
Bookmark the parent so you can use it as prior art when the new type of mice hit the
Shut off the computer (Score:3, Funny)
Use the other hand (Score:2)
Easy (Score:2)
Ctl+Alt+down arrow
Voila ! scroll bars on the left
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I'm on an XP (Pro) computer and that's not doing anything. What's it supposed to do?
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Ctl-Alt-Up Arrow to re-invert the screen.
IANASP (Score:2)
Let's say you write something down on paper with your left hand. Then the main problem is that your arm is in the way when writing left to right. So left handed people often have their hands all curled up just so they can see what they're writing.
But with a mouse, there's no arm in the way to hide what's on the screen. So what's the practical advantage of putting a scrollbar on the other side?
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"Now that laptops (and obviously tablets) have integrated touch technology, the new challenge for south paws is to use a stylus. .
But, if you ask me, scroll bars are more or less impossible to use anyway. Give me a rocker button or an equivalent stylus gesture any day. A device that requires dragging scroll bars around with a stylus is broken, no matter which hand you want to use.
the Leftorium (Score:3, Funny)
Get over it already! (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, to the point in hand: I'm well aware of and irritated by the "dextrism" that pervades manufacures goods (numeric keypad on the right is my pet peeve) but honestly I had never given the position of the scroll bar a second thought until I read this article. It's just a waste of effort to have to acquire a left-handed version of every common product, and if you've got to the point where you're complaining about where the scroll bar is then you're just overdoing it. I mean, mouse pointer too far from the scroll bar? Give it a nudge and - look! - it's over there, near the scroll bar! Problem solved! Or use the wheel and forget about it. It's not even clear that this is a case of dextrism - the scroll bar has to be somewhere; this is more likely to be influenced by text reading direction than the majority dominant hand.
You have to be able to adapt to the environment you find yourself in. Putting up with default computing environments makes you more comfortable when using random machines and makes your machine a *lot* easier to use should anyone need to do something quickly on it over your shoulder. I've got a left-handed colleague who swaps his mouse buttons and I have to help him with stuff on his computer from time to time. Just can't adapt to it, no matter how many times I use it.
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It IS possible, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
So, Windows does support it. The question is, how do you enable it in an English left-to-right OS?
Use the right? (Score:2)
I found it very helpful to switch mouse buttons at the same time. Feels much more similar to use the "same finger" than the same button. YMMV.
Why do lefties reverse mouse buttons?? (Score:2)
They're the left and right buttons. Software responds to a left button click, not to "a click of the button that happens to be under your index finger". I use a mouse with either hand - without swapping buttons - and manage to click the button on the left side of the mouse without any confusion.
I can understand that some mice have an awkward shape, which is annoying to hold in the left hand. But who added the option to reverse the button
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Actually they are not 'right' and 'left', they are 'primary' and 'secondary'. However, they are commonly referred to as right and left - but that's typical in a right-hand dominated society.
Even Wikipedia avoids the sidedness distinction in an article about contextual menus [wikipedia.org] and this one specifically about mice [wikipedia.org].
You can do it programmatically in a nano (Score:2)
I never learned enough about the Win32 API to know whether a window class has a similar property, but I suspect it does
don't switch hands (Score:2)
Re:south paw? (Score:4, Informative)
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southpaw |?sou??pô| noun a left-handed person, esp. a boxer who leads with the right hand or a baseball pitcher . ORIGIN mid 19th cent.(denoting the left hand or a punch with the left hand): the usage in baseball is perhaps from the orientation of early baseba
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Re:RTFOP (Score:2)
Meanwhile: Scroll wheels are often slower than just clicking where you want to go. For short documents the time it takes to move to the scroll bar is enough that using the scroll wheel would be faster, but if you're expected to be holding a stylus that generally isnt the case (most people can point to something specific faster using a stylus than a mouse). This guy's problem is that he takes 5d6 holy damage whenever his arms briefly cross.
Am I the only one who wa
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Ugh, why do people do that? (Score:2)
Here are the instructions for that [gnustep.org].
Why do that when you could have a nice stable GNU/Linux installed in twenty minutes? Does anyone rea
No drivers (Score:2)
Because the time to make each single modification to an existing Windows installation is cheaper than the money to re-buy peripherals whose manufacturer doesn't care for Linux.
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Replacing the entire operating system just for one little quality-of-life feature is like replacing your entire house just for the new garage door opener.
(And you all thought I was going to drop a Bad Car Analogy on you.)