Rework in-document touch navigation / gestures
Nowadays touchscreen devices are more and more common, for Gnome convertible laptops should be of special relevance. Especially for reading documents many people prefer a tablet like experience, since horizontal mode fits the aspect ratio of document pages much better and interaction with the document is much more natural via touchscreen.
While evince is usable on a touchscreen, there are a few areas where it is lacking in my opinion:
- Following links: there is no way to jump back to the previous document position using touch navigation (this is a regression since the buttons to jump back / forth have been removed, see #1253 (closed))
- The "Two finger swipe" gestures documented in Keyboard shortcuts do not work in practice, evince starts zooming instead of going to the previous / next page as the gesture promises, see #1401
- When selecting text by moving with one finger over the text, it is not possible to trigger the right click menu to copy text. Right clicking via long pressing is not possible in envince at all, no matter whether text is selected or not, see #1301
- Sometimes getting stuck in text selection mode when you just want to scroll, see #1082
To address those problems I have the following suggestions:
-
Long pressing on a link, should trigger the same link overlay preview that hovering via mouse currently triggers, see !205 (comment 1264470) -
There should be a gesture to go back to the previous page visited. Two finger swipe left/right comes to mind, that is currently broken anyway. Furthermore I would argue, that going to the last visited page is much more relevant as a gesture than going to the previous or next page, since that is cheap to do anyway in contrast to navigating to the previous or next visited page. Alternatively if you don't agree on that, you could introduce a three finger gesture for that. -
Right clicking should be possible. -
Maybe it would be good to handle text selection similar to text editors: bring up selection markers, clicking on the text selection brings up the context menu to copy text, clicking somewhere else leaves the selection mode.
@aday Subscribing you for your input here. Certainly all those issues need to be addressed simultaneously, especially since there might be conflicting gestures to resolve individual problems.
Edited by Esokrates