I find single click useful for short lists of properties when using nautilus(since it’s possible to expand the little info showing files size etc to include things like perms, time created/modified or whatever), single clicking is rather common for me(since I always right click and choose an appropriate program to open things with anyway, I rarely want to use the default for anything).
That and I’m all too often using scripts to do tasks the easy way.
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The double click is awful, but habit, probably one that is hard to break. It isn’t even select then open because if you select something, you still have to double click to open it. I like the single-click interface for folder browsing, but I agree that it was implemented horribly in xp with the timing.
What’s even worse is that double click in a text field and it selects…there goes the inconsistency again…
I got stuck in a problem where i need to recognize single click and double click in a radio button. It was a baffling problem for me. I could find the solution so went ahead with a workaround… but i do agree with Jeff that Web is single click and double click shud die.
I agree above poster, I really appreciate the mouse chords and gestures of Opera. As with the double click, these are useful, but unintuitive. Neither should probably be used without providing a more intuitive alternative (as is done in Opera).
After reading this, I immediately enabled single click. Though, I rarely click icons anyway, when I can just start typing the name to get my selection to jump to it, then hit enter to launch.
I agree that double (or God forbid, triple) clicking leads to a really awful user experience. For non-power users, it can be incredibly hard to do (especially triple clicking), and can be difficult and/or slow even for power users.
Rather than adding even more buttons to the mouse, why not use a keyboard modifier? We already use Ctrl to select multiple non-contiguous items at once, and Shift to select multiple contiguous items at once. We could either use Ctrl or Alt to mean “select”, with left-click meaning “open”.
I just configured Nautilus to use single-click open, and the above suggestion works just fine. You left click to open an item, and Ctrl+click to select 1 or more items. You can also right click on an item to select it (and bring up the menu at the same time), then dismiss the menu.
One might argue that this is bad for interfaces that don’t have a keyboard (PDAs, iPhone, etc.) but the same is true for adding more buttons to the mouse. In addition, we can’t really add more buttons because we have to assume the user is using a 2-button mouse; but we can safely assume the user is using a keyboard.
In the cases where the interface doesn’t have a keyboard (iPhone, etc.) they already use custom methods for select/open/menu (using two-fingers rather than one, swiping your finger in a particular direction, etc.) so we don’t need to worry so much about them.
I never even thought of double-click as being redundant and stupid. I just switched Nautilus to using single clicks to open files. That’s the more common action. If I want to select files, I can drag or use modifier keys.
Thanks!
AMEN! I know this post is really old but it’s still really relevant. We also had an issue with duplicate data that turned out to be people double-clicking on submit buttons. My two thoughts:
All browsers should disable double-clicking on form submit buttons; it should be treated as a single-click. If someone really wants users to be able to submit a form twice quickly, someone can invent a new CSS style or something to enable that.
Would Mac, Windows, Ubuntu, and everybody else please make single-click do the “default” action everywhere, for example open up the application or document if you’re clicking an icon on the desktop? Then users will stop learning that they “need” to double-click to get things to happen. If someone really needs the ability to select an icon on the desktop but not open it, provide some other way to do that.
Sure double clicking is a bad idea but in the future, there will be no novice users. The younger generations learn about double click before they are even literate. The last generation that has novice users is a boomers who are slowly dying off.
Most of these young people use smartphones primarily which has zero concept of double-tap. Tap and hold, yes.