Mouse Control

**rarson** · January 24th, 2010, 12:32 AM

Is right-click instead of escape a documented feature of Boxee? I've spent hours wading through all sorts of information completely unable to find anything about basic mouse controls. I've seen user posts that say "you can control Boxee entirely with the mouse," but no one actually explains it.

The problem is that using right-click is extremely frustrating. More often than not, it doesn't work. Expanding the menu on the left and right-clicking in the empty area near the bottom doesn't work. Boxee also doesn't seem to like using the right button if the pointer is on top of something, or even if it's not but something is still selected (which means I have to go even farther away from it to get it to unselect, so I'm usually taking my mouse all over the screen just to perform a simple navigation function). When I open a TV show and the list of episodes comes up, I can't go back if the pointer is on any of the episodes. If there are a lot of items on the screen, it becomes practically impossible to go back using right-click. Right-clicking on or around where the weather and time are works less than half the time. If I'm trying to get to the main menu, sometimes it will actually flash up on screen very briefly and then go away again (that's usually what ends up happening over and over again when there are a lot of items on the screen). If I get into a frenzy of right-clicks while I move the pointer around, that works sometimes, but if I don't avoid right-clicking on the items I'm trying to get away from, phantom shortcuts will inexplicably be created. I've noticed it 3 times now when 1 or more extra shortcuts appeared on the menu after several seconds of frantic right-clicking.

I don't understand why right-clicking would act any different than hitting escape. Seems to me like it would just be a different button mapped.

I'm guessing that almost no one uses a mouse because even searching the forum for "mouse controls," "mouse navigation," etc. is a complete waste of time. I'm kind of surprised by the lack of any kind of mention of basic mouse navigation. The wiki explains the interface without saying anything at all about going back with the mouse. Nothing. Not even whether it's supported or not. It's also got a link to an explanatory video on Youtube that was posted in 2008. Needless to say, I found that to be equally useless.

I also find it annoying that moving the mouse towards the bottom of the screen starts to scroll lists. For one thing, that's completely unnecessary when I've got a scroll wheel. It also makes choosing things from large lists more difficult, and for some of the really large lists, I've got to use the scroll wheel anyway to speed things up or I'll be waiting all day.

Also, I've got my Radeon 3870 hooked up to a regular 4:3 standard-def TV using S-video, and when I pick 4:3 (1.33), the box is rectangular. I have to adjust it to right around 1 for it to be a square. I'm running Windows 7 64-bit, by the way.

**marcel** · January 24th, 2010, 02:20 AM

The mouse functionality has been frustrating and will be fixed in the next version due to be released in a couple of days..

**darcilicious** · January 24th, 2010, 10:02 AM

For what it's worth, I use the mouse quite a bit and mouse-related were issues reported at http://jira.boxee.tv/

**jklondon** · January 24th, 2010, 11:17 AM

yep also getting annoyed with mouse control - not as smooth as xbmc and big thing is that its cant be moved anywhere to the right 1/3 of the screen for some reasons. hopefully fixed soon!

**Panahasi** · January 24th, 2010, 12:09 PM

Originally Posted by marcel

The mouse functionality has been frustrating and will be fixed in the next version due to be released in a couple of days..

/me jumps up and down with extreme delight!

**Joshua B** · January 24th, 2010, 02:56 PM

Originally Posted by jklondon

and big thing is that its cant be moved anywhere to the right 1/3 of the screen for some reasons. hopefully fixed soon!

Thank you! I thought this was just my issue.

Odd "sometimes right click acts as back, sometimes it doesn't" thing is weird too.

**rarson** · January 25th, 2010, 05:12 AM

Interesting that no one answered the question in my very first sentence.

See, for me, this has been the most frustrating part of the Boxee experience in the day or so that I've attempted to use it. Documentation of basic information is non-existent. I'm assuming that the right-click feature is intended to work the same as the escape key, and yet I can't find that documented anywhere. Nowhere does it say "You can use the right mouse button to go back."

I know that mouse functionality has been an issue. Like I said, I spent hours trying to find information about it. It's not so much the mouse functionality that frustrates me, but the (lack of) documentation of it.

**DPK** · January 25th, 2010, 06:58 AM

Originally Posted by rarson

Interesting that no one answered the question in my very first sentence.

I know that mouse functionality has been an issue. Like I said, I spent hours trying to find information about it. It's not so much the mouse functionality that frustrates me, but the (lack of) documentation of it.

The reason probably being is that nobody really knows at the moment the true direction of mouse controls. They've been kind of "broken" since alpha and their functionality has changed a few times along with keyboard controls. An example being that at one point both the escape and backspace keys did different things, but now they operate similarly. The same goes with mouse controls.

The developers have acknowledged this issue though (I saw a post on jira somewhere, but can't remember exactly where) and are, as Marcel has mentioned, fixing the problem come next release.