Re: Patch: Info-mode bindings for forward and back mouse buttons

[Stefan Monnier]

> When using a common type of mouse with two normal buttons, a scroll
> wheel, and two side thumb buttons for "forward" and "back", the last
> two buttons are not bound in Info-mode.  Patch below.

> (As the buttons are not currently bound to anything, I assume that it
> is not crucial to make absolutely sure that mouse-6 and mouse-7 have
> no other meaning on some other type of mouse.)

Actually it is: several devices now offer "horizontal wheels" of one sort or
another and typically use buttons 6 and 7 for that.  You can do that for
example with the "EmulateWheel" in X.org which allows you to simulate a (2
dimensional) wheel by pressing a mouse button (typically mouse-2) in
which case. unless you precisely move the mouse only vertically, you'll
inevitably get some horizontal-scroll events as well.  Binding those events
to history-forward and history-backward makes the whole thing unusable.

> Someone might argue that this should instead be part of mwheel.el, and
> I have no opinion on that, as long as the buttons work by default.

Actually, I think that we should add bindings such as

  (define-key Info-mode-map [hist-forward] 'Info-history-forward)
  (define-key Info-mode-map [hist-backward] 'Info-history-back)

and you'd then only need to add to your .emacs settings such as:

  (define-key function-key-map [mouse-6] [hist-forward])
  (define-key function-key-map [mouse-7] [hist-backward])

and I could add similar bindings in my .emacs for the special keys on my
keyboard that offer the same functionality.


        Stefan