Day 15: Mouse Gestures

[Note: today’s Opera Lover was written by Stefan M. Huber. My thanks to Stefan for his efforts.]

Opera’s slogan “The fastest browser on Earth” is an oft-mistaken one. It is not necessarily the fastest browser in terms of startup performance or rendering (lynx is faster), but it presents you with builtin features that speed up using the internet suite. Mouse gestures are such a thing: They enable you to perform actions with an elegant movement of your hand.

What’s a mouse gesture?

Basically, a mouse gesture is a specific movement with your mouse while holding down the right mouse button.

So when I am writing about the gesture ↑ → (up, then right), this is what you do:

1. press and hold the right mouse button
2. move the mouse up a bit
3. move the mouse to the right a bit
4. release the right mouse button

Go ahead and try this gesture in the current page! The effect will be that the current web page will be maximized or restored, respectively.

If you perform a mouse gesture for the very first time, Opera will prompt you if you really want to activate mouse gestures. It pays if you do.

Using mouse gestures requires a little bit of exercise so that you move in as straight lines as possible. So if you did not yet succeed in changing the size of the page you’re reading, try the above mentioned ↑ → gesture again.

You succeeded? Great! Now you have a powerful tool at your hands that enables you to quickly perform actions for which you would normally use both hands or keyboard and mouse. This would be a really short day, if I stopped here. There are some things to talk about yet. What other predefined gestures are there? How do you find out which gestures are defined at all? How do you configure mouse gestures yourself? And at the end of this day, I’ll show you my personal favourites.

Other types of gestures

Before we continue discussing the other predefined gestures, let me tell you that there are more things you can do with your mouse than moving it around while the right button is held down. You can also flip the buttons or use the mouse wheel while holding the right button.

Flipping is quite a simple thing. There are two directions of flipping: forward and back. FlipForward means that you click and hold the left button, click the right button and then release both. FlipBack is just the other way around. The default actions for thse gestures are just going forward (or fast forward) and back in history. As long as you promise to come back to this page, try flipping back to go to the page you just came from and then flip forward again.

Using the Ctrl key while scrolling the mouse wheel changes the zoom of web pages. With Shift + scroll, you move forth and back in your browsing history.

Wheel-gesturing is simple as well. Click and hold your right mouse button while using the scroll wheel. This gesture enables you to switch between open web pages, so you will only see the effects when you have more than one window opened.

Of course, anchored scrolling (or panning) works as well in Opera: Click the mouse wheel and move the mouse up or down. Click the wheel again to exit anchored scrolling.

Useful predefined gestures

I wrote, mouse gestures speed up things. The mouse gesture I presented above is not a good example for this. When browsing the WWW, what is it that you need? You often close pages, you often follow links, you sometimes reload pages or stop loading them. For all of these actions default gestures are defined.

• ← goes back in history.
• → goes (fast) forward in history.
• ↑ stops page loading.
• ↓ opens a link in a new window. To see the effects of this gesture, move your mouse over a link and perform the gesture.
• ↓ ↑ opens a link in the background. This is a very handy mouse gesture.
• ↑ ↓ reloads the current page.
• ↓ ← minimizes the page. When not performed on a link, it duplicates the page.
• ↓ → closes the current page (pretty please don’t do that now).
• ↑ → maximizes or restores the current page.

Personally, I do not use many mouse gestures. But those I actually do, I use excessively.

Configuring mouse gestures yourself

It wouldn’t be Opera, if you could not modify the mouse gesture setup yourself. It’s quite easy to change the behaviour of Opera when you perform mouse gestures. Open the preferences window (Alt+P), go to the advanced tab and open the shortcuts preferences. You will find the keyboard and mouse setup. Both items can be configured similarly.

When you edit the mouse setup, you will notice that there are several sections of which only the application section is populated. The others simply inherit from this section. If you open the application setup, you will see the basic gesture descriptions and actions that are executed. The actions are described elsewhere (is there a day about these things)???

There are six very important gestures that can be used: GestureUp, GestureRight, GestureDown, GestureLeft, FlipForward, FlipBack. Together with modifiers like shift, ctrl or alt you can tweak the setup to your likings.

My personal favourites

There are a few mouse gestures that I changed and which I don’t want to keep for myself. The mail gestures significantly speed up mail checks by using the mouse only. Here they are.

• Application
  • GestureRight … View hotlist, 0 | View hotlist, 7. This toggles the panels on or off to quickly offer more space for browsing
• Browser Window
  • GestureLeft … Enable mediumscreen mode | Disable mediumscreen mode
  • GestureUp … Select user mode | Select author mode
• Mail Window
  • FlipForward … Mark and select next unread
  • FlipBack … Undo

[Note: Stefan has also written a page which enables programmers to enhance their applications with mouse gestures].