So not “empty space”? And if you wanted the playback control central you’d have to add empty space around it, which would then be wasted space that could have been used to show detail in the audio level meter?
And for “4k” (or rather 16:9), you’ve made that dock window too wide anyway, and the real empty wasted space is the grey bars which are there because you’ve made that window too wide for the aspect of what you are editing? So fix that and your controls automatically stop being in a dead area that you created?
it not supporting mouse button binds requires you to … deal with having to do most things with your keyboard hand
Which really is not “inefficient” at all. For a proficient editor, it’s extremely efficient. It’s just not a novice UI. It takes time to learn what’s possible, and practice to develop the skill.
Adding an extra row of buttons for your right hand isn’t going to make you a one-handed piano virtuoso. It’s a two handed instrument, even if beginners can do a few things with it with just one hand.
It might not be what you want to hear, but no amount of UI tweaking can fix “I don’t want to learn”. If you want your life to be easier, there really is no shortcut around learning the skills that will do so. And yes, your new tool is different to your old tool, so not all your skills and experience and habits are directly transferable.
Being a fantastic piano player doesn’t make you a flamenco guitar player.
Being able to bind my mouse’s thumb button
And I don’t know how many times I can repeat there is no technical mechanism for this. That’s not a “kdenlive thing”. I might sympathise with you wanting that to be different, but that doesn’t change the reality that means it’s not possible in the way that you want it to be.
There is one for rebinding keyboard mappings, and we use it to let you customise the hotkeys. But that is not how mouse actions work. It’s a different brand of input device, with its own idioms and customs and interoperability concerns.
If you have a mouse with “extra buttons” and you want them to act like keyboard keys, you’ll need to use a tool that intercepts and translates them to keyboard keys. And find a way to make that fit into the way you work. Or buy a device that offers them as actual keyboard keys - there’s been plenty of experiments with those over the years too, but none have had the general purpose utility to become ubiquitous.
You bought a device with extra buttons, that in most use contexts have no standard or established meaning, and no way that you like to make them applicable in any general way. We didn’t expect you to buy it any more than we expect you to buy a jog console, but to us it just looks like a “mouse”, so all you get to do with it is standard mouse-things that any device professing to be a “mouse” can do.
Hard coding kdenlive actions to depend on more than the usual number of mouse buttons (which is the only way mouse actions are actually handled), and forcing people to use such a mouse, would be no different from forcing people to use a jog shuttle. And would probably make the UI more unfriendly because now everyone has to learn what all those extra buttons do in each context as well as the keyboard mappings.
I think that’s where there’s a conflict.
Yes. Because if you repeatedly insist “I want to do <something> in a way that is fundamentally impossible”, then nobody in the world can help you with that.
But if you ask “what’s the best way to do <something>”, then you’re much more likely to get some useful guidance and start a conversation on the various options and their merits and if there is in fact some new way we could do that thing better.
It’s a problem that people seem to make so often that it Has A Name. And it’s a problem because it’s initially impassible and wastes enormous amount of time trying to translate what you’ve been trying to do into what you actually want to achieve before any possibility of meaningfully recognising what’s actually failing you and what if anything might benefit from being improved can emerge.
Can you suggest a way to do this that doesn’t require buying
Learn how to do more than one thing with the hand that’s on the keyboard? There are a vast array of options that will make your work simpler and your life better if you develop and nurture that skill.
it’s too prescriptive and getting categorized as complaining
Some of it is definitely coming across that way, or if not ‘complaining’ then as extreme fixation - but as you might have noticed I’m trying pretty hard to find some way to move this discussion beyond that and into territory where something good and productive might actually come from it - and the more you write, the more it starts to seem that you’re just both very new to Linux, whatever DE you’re running on it, and Kdenlive - and you have a lot of experience/baggage from another app/environment that you’re trying to bring with you, but at least a few of those bags simply don’t fit in the overhead lockers, so your only options for those ultimately are “leave them behind”, or “build a new vehicle with different shaped lockers”.
And kdenlive is not the vehicle in this analogy, we’re just the cabin service riding on it too.
I think a question to ask is why is binding a mouse button request getting this much resistance?
Because you might as well be asking “why can’t I fly when I flap my arms?”. That’s not something arms let you do in the universe we live in.
You might be able to create one where you can, but it would take far more fundamental changes to the Basic Laws that govern it than “can’t you just just add some feathers?”.
I don’t mean you should implement everything I or the community ask for
Your use case is definitely one we should support, ultimately in the best way that we can. But there really is a “when in Rome” element to any working environment, and I do think the potential feedback you have to offer will be a lot more valuable if you take the time to take a step back from all the old habits you learned with different tools to learn the ways that many years of experience and user feedback have already shaped the current “kdenlive way” of doing things. And to do that with ‘new eyes’ and an openness to try to learn different ways of doing things, as if you were new to this all over again.
Because right now you seem very annoyed at the things which don’t work the same way they used to for you, but you don’t really seem to have explored the strengths of the alternative ways to do them that kdenlive offers, and I do get the feeling that many of them you are still completely unaware of.
Retraining people is often much harder than just training them in the first place, because it can be really hard to unlearn old, inapplicable, habits that you’ve deeply internalised.
I think your potential for genuinely and richly useful and actionable feedback will greatly improve once you’ve gained a deep enough familiarity with your new environment to be able to objectively compare the new ways you learn to do something with what was possible in other tools you have experience with (as opposed to just noting that what you used to do doesn’t work the same way as it used to, with no real insight yet into what other options you might have for doing it in some different but even more efficient and powerful way).
Every good tool as fundamentally complex as Kdenlive really has two user interfaces, there’s the “as self-evident as possible” simplistic one that lets new or infrequent users find their way around like a one-fingered typist. And there’s the one that actual power users use, which makes them orders of magnitude more productive than the novices.
It is usually a mistake, in both directions, to try and make either of those more like the other, because in both cases it compromises the utility for the actual target audience.
You seem to be coming from a place where you were something of a power user with your previous tool, into the dissonance of initially being a novice user of Kdenlive, and you’re talking about that conflict before you’ve really had time to investigate and understand all the little secrets and fundamental axioms which are what make ‘power users’ powerful.
