Loved your response about the wheel mouse, Bill. It's true, it does seem very redundant, but it also seems kinda natural (in a wierd sort of way).

----- Original Message -----
From: Bill J Gray
To: guide-user@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, December 03, 2002 8:50 PM
Subject: [guide-user] Celestial equator/wheel-mouse zoom


Lawrence, I'm not so much surprised that the celestial equator
went away as that you had it in the first place. Guide will show
an horizon, galactic equator, and ecliptic... but not a celestial
equator.

It just occurred to me, though, that if one _did_ want a
celestial equator, it could be done by editing 'startup.mar'
and looking for the line starting with:

25 Marking 7...

This is the line containing settings for the galactic equator
display. Change it to read:

25 Marking 5 1 5 0...

(dots indicating "don't change anything after that point"), and
Guide will show the celestial equator. Right-click on it, and you'll
see that Guide still "thinks" of it as the galactic equator and you can
adjust its color and turn it on or off.

Downside to this is that you can no longer display the galactic equator.
But most people are probably not too interested in this anyway. (Of course,
the other downside is that it is only documented, in a highly oblique
manner, at

http://www.projectpluto.com/mar_fmt.htm#markings

I doubt if any but the most fanatic of Guide users would know about it!)

About the mouse wheel: I can probably arrange something like this,
but should probably make sure I'm implementing the right thing first.

I can rig up Guide so that you can push the mouse wheel down, move
it up (to zoom in) or down (to zoom out), getting a zoom box centered
on the cursor. When you let go of the mouse wheel, Guide would redraw.

You can already zoom in by holding down the left mouse button and
dragging open a zoom box. You can already zoom _out_ by doing the same
thing with the center mouse button, on a three-button mouse. (With
a wheel mouse, the wheel is the center button.)

For those with Stone Age, two-button mice: you can zoom out by
holding down a Shift key while dragging open a box with the left mouse
button. Seems clumsy to me, I admit... though I gather Mac users have
put up with such things for a long time, and I wanted to provide _some_
sort of "zoom out" function for two-button mouse users.

The only real objection I'd have to using the wheel to zoom in/out
is that it seems redundant. We've got good, mouse-based ways to zoom
in and out, so how does the wheel help us? (I'm assuming that I've
overlooked something obvious here!)

I have a wheel mouse myself, and have long thought that the wheel
ought to do _something_ useful (aside from scrolling through list boxes).
Perhaps this will be it; doing something redundant would at least be
better than having it do nothing at all.

-- Bill


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