Mouse gestures – theory and limitations

I got a really interesting question for opening images in IrfanView with a mouse gesture instead of using the right click menu from jme3 in my blog post about Azureus, IrfanView and Open folder for transfers in Right Click menu:

Originally posted by jme3:

I would love to open an image in IrfanView when pressing shift and clicking the left button of the mouse.

Resume: theoretically it may work but I couldn't get Opera to do it properly.

… …

Theoretical background

Opera is capable to do with mouse gestures about the same actions as with menus (like in my blog-post), toolbars (custom buttons) and keyboard shortcuts.

The mouse gestures (to click a button is kind of the most simple gesture) you can customize in the user interface of Opera in
Menu – Tools – Preferences (or CTRL+F12) – Advanced – Shortcuts: Mouse setup

1st you should use a copy to have a fallback in case you are messing with the settings (click "duplicate")

2nd click "edit…" while "Copy of Opera Standard" (or whatever you want) is highlighted
most gestures are defined within the section "application" (click "+")

On the left side there is the gesture and on the right side the action to use (there is a popup-list with all possible predefined actions), for example:
GestureDown …… Open link in new page | New page
(if you do GestureDown above a link the link should open in a new page=tab, else a new empty page=tab appeares)

Instead of using the UI you can manually edit the […]mouse.ini in the profile-subfolder …\Opera\profile\mouse\

Mouse gestures explained

Button1 – left click (not subject to change)
Button2 – right click (not subject to change)

Button3 – middle click = mouse wheel click (action on link is not subject to change the described way, it can only be customized in Preferences – Advanced – Shortcuts – Middle click options)

Button4 to Button{x} – additional mouse buttons (like a thumb button for back, mouse wheel left+right for horizontal scrolling; some mouse drivers apply special functions and not the button clicks, but with them sometimes you can apply keyboard-shortcuts and make use of them in Opera with the drawback they may be useless in other applications; not sure what exactly works with Opera)

FlipForward – hold left button and click right button
FlipBack – hold right button and click left button
GestureUp – hold right button and move up
GestureDown – hold right button and move down
GestureRight – hold right button and move right
GestureLeft – hold right button and move left

• You can combine gestures comma seperated (like "GestureDown, GestureRight=Close page, 1" – move the mouse down and afterwards right without releasing the right button opens a new page=tab)
• also more than two gestures can be combined (like "GestureDown, GestureRight, GestureUp=New browser window" – drawing U while right mouse button is pressed opens a new Opera window)
• You can add "shift", "ctrl" and "alt" to make the action work only when the special key is pressed while you perform the gesture (like GestureLeft shift=Rewind)
• there are also gestures with mouse wheel, but there seems to be no way to customize them

Links

• There should be mouse-gestures for download on my.opera, but there seems to be no setup available right now
• User guide for the default gestures
• User guide as sidebar=panel
• Information to change ini-files including keyboard and mouse setup could be found on http://operawiki.info/EditingINIFiles (I added the section about the mouse gestures)

And now to the specific question

Originally posted by jme3:

I would love to open an image in IrfanView when pressing shift and clicking the left button of the mouse.

The syntax for this would be:
Button1 shift ….. Copy image & Execute program,"C:\Programme\IrfanView\i_view32.exe","/clippaste"
with your path to IrfanView

First problem: you cannot customize button1 and 2

Second problem: the action "Copy image" doesn't work properly (at least not for me). It worked sometimes but really seldom (with mouse gestures other than button1), but copying the image doesn't work most of the times: I tried it with "GestureDown" and "FlipForward shift". IrfanView was opened with what actually was in the clipboard – only in about two of 30 trials (doing the gesture above an image) it actually copied the image. I tried only "Copy image" without "Execute program…" (for the case it is just a problem of timing), but this neither worked.

Maybe you'd like to try it yourself, maybe it is a problem with my setup.

Please leave a comment if you have different experiences.