scrolling the sidebar with the scroll-wheel

The sidebar comes with a vertical scrollbar for when content doesn't fit in the available space. But the mouse pointer has to be right over the scrollbar to use your scroll wheel, it doesn't work to hover over the content of the sidebar and move the wheel there.

Which is annoying, but on trying to fix that I realized the snag with allowing the wheel-scroll over the sidebar. If you scroll the sidebar down and a widget contained in it ends up under the mouse pointer then if it is a widget which accepts the wheel-scroll it's very easy to accidentally make a change to the widget that has scrolled under the mouse pointer. Spin Buttons for example.

As an aside, this is the exact same problem that I have in glade where I scroll down the property pane with the scroll-wheel and accidentally end up over the "Ellipsize" listbox and inadvertently change it from None to Middle. So if you find labels in LibreOffice with "..." in the middle of them for no good reason, this is why.

Anyway, I still want to scroll the sidebar, but I don't want to end up with this conflicting target-location widget wheel-scroll conflict, so my solution is to continue to send the wheel-scroll events to the previous target so long as the position of the mouse pointer is at the same place as the last wheel event and the time between events is <= the default timeout for raising help tips, i.e. 1/2 a second.

Seems to work well for me, scrolling the sidebars "just works" on master (LibreOffice 4.4) with the scroll wheel without random changes to any scroll-wheel sensitive contents but you can still use the scroll-wheel to modify those widgets on moving to them or when the little timeout completes.

dialog conversion status, 99 to go

 Converting LibreOffice dialogs to .ui format, 99 conversions remaining

We've now converted all but 99 of LibreOffice’s classic fixed widget size and position .src format elements to the GtkBuilder .ui format. This is due to the much appreciated efforts of Palenik Mihály and Szymon Kłos, two of our GSOC2014 students, who are tackling the last bunch of hard to find or hard to convert ones.


Current conversion stats are:
741 .ui files currently exist
There are 46 unconverted dialogs
There are 53 unconverted tabpages
An estimated additional 99 .ui are required
We are 88% of the way through.