Double-click is evil!

[eekee]

(I just noticed we don't have a UI design forum.)

I used to hate double-click because it made my finger hurt far more than any other interface feature. It's not so bad now I use a tablet half the time, and perhaps modern mice help, but the timing fudge factor interferes whenever I want to do things quickly. It's worse on Windows which doesn't send the second click of a pair, so even widgets which don't respond to double-click are bogged down by it. It's no use changing the timing because sometimes my nervous system is a bit slower than others.

The only place I value double-click is in selecting words, but there are other options for that. One is to have a drag which passes a word boundary change to selecting whole words, but I don't like that very much. Another would be to use another button key, or a modifier key. Another which I've just thought of would be a pie menu with a 'select word' option. I found pie menus as originally implemented in Second Life to be every bit as fast and convenient as a double-click but far easier on the fingers and, of course, far more powerful with their 8 segments. (With 2 levels, reserving 1 segment to switch to the next level which I think you always should, an 8-segment pie menu offers 7 immediate options and another 7 almost immediate.)

[PeterX]

You played Second Life!? It is said to be evil and addictive. Don't know if that's true. Sorry, off-topic...

Regarding double click:
Double click is kind of a symbol for my Windows usage. Back in the days when I used only Windows I used double click and liked it. Much later, when I was already familiar with Linux, I started to use single click on Linux and double click on Windows. Now I don't use double click anymore and find it annoying. And I don't use Windows anymore at all.

I guess some people love double click. So it would be good if a OS supports that.

Greetings
Peter

[bloodline]

A UI design point that drives me nuts is autorise, where a window is automatically shuffled to the front of view when one clicks on it.

In my operating system, the widow z order is only changed by using the depth gadget, or by double clicking on it (which will bring the window to the front of the view). That's one use where I really like having a double click.

[eekee]

OT: @PeterX: Second Life is evil in the way big cities are; you can find absolutely everything there if you know where to look. It's addictive largely because it is in some ways much more empowering and fascinating than real life, the visuals are often bright and cheering, and it's so easy to access. It's also addictive because porn is addictive and it's not at all hard to find it -- sometimes you'll see things you don't want to in the welcome centers.

Not so OT: If you want to try the pie menu with fewer problems, try Digiworldz or Discovery Grid; their welcome centers are clean. The Firestorm viewer (client) has the pie menu; I'm not sure which others do. Most of the pie menu entries work as well as ever, but jumping in and out of edit mode (which was extremely useful) has been broken for no reason for over 10 years. Terrible software which contains a few left-over bits of genius. Companies like Digiworldz and Discovery Grid are trying to make something nice out of it with compatible server software (OpenSim), but it's too big a task for a small company.

@PeterX again: I set Win98 to single-click everywhere. You could do that with Active Directories. I don't think you can do it in Win10. In Linux, I preferred the command line with menus for lesser-used programs.

@bloodline: I've configured raising windows in so many different ways over the years. I always had mouse-focus; it makes so much more sense at the window level than click-to-focus. Some window managers in mouse-focus mode defaulted to not raising the window unless the title bar was clicked. That was almost okay, but the taskbar could be a fiddly little thing. I often had window managers configured with keybindings to raise and lower windows, and generally found lowering a more useful operation than raising. Lowering can also replace alt-tab. The only time I thought raising better than lowering was when I had a mess of little windows and one or two big ones.

[nullplan]

I set Win98 to single-click everywhere. You could do that with Active Directories. I don't think you can do it in Win10.

Single click to open (and hover to select) is still an option in Windows 10. I use it at work. Mouse focus regrettably not, but you can tell it to at least scroll inactive windows when you spin the mouse wheel. Which is sort of what I want, now I just have to remember to click to grant keyboard focus.

[iansjack]

A design choice may be a good choice or a bad choice, but to call it evil is not very sensible.

[eekee]

@iansjack: I was attempting to exaggerate for comedic effect, but I guess I failed to make that obvious.

[Qbyte]

Single clicking to open folders, files and programs is much nicer and I always change my settings to have it that way. It's kind of strange that double clicking was considered an acceptable thing back when it was introduced because it's not user friendly for both new and advanced users. New users who have never used a computer before could reasonably be expected to move the mouse and notice a pointer moving on the screen and would find it intuitive to open something by moving the pointer onto it and then clicking it. It's not at all intutitive to have to perform a fast double click to open something, and many elderly users can struggle to perform that action. It's existence is probably due to the fact that the earliest mice only had a single button so the only way to give it multiple functions (like right-clicking) was via a temporal code.

[eekee]

Yes indeed. However, even with 3 buttons, I found myself always double-clicking to select words. That's what made me get used to it.

What's especially strange is early consumer-grade mice had switches which made double-click especially painful. I don't know why there wasn't a bit of an outcry. Perhaps most people right-clicked and selected Open; I don't know.