== Dealing with Fitts' Law on widescreen displays

One of the [[usual sayings ../unix/FittsAndEdgeFlipping]] derived from
[[Fitts' Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27_law]] is that four of
the five easiest locations to reach with the mouse are the four corners
of the screen, because they require very little precision (the edges
trap the mouse and guide it into the corner). Over the years I've made
[[some modifications ../unix/FittsAndEdgeFlipping]] to [[my desktop
environment MyDesktopTour]] to make better use of this principle. The
most important one is [[how I use the top left corner XtermZiconbeep]];
I have [[my taskbar equivalent HowIUseFvwmIconMan]] arranged so that
when an iconified terminal window gets output, I can just zoom my mouse
to that corner and click in order to reveal the terminal window.

Zooming to a corner is a fast operation in most setups; it works
fine on a single monitor, even a single widescreen monitor, and on a
normal dual-monitor setup such as [[my work desktop MyDesktopTour]]. But
recently (for reasons beyond the scope of this blog) my work setup got
updated to dual widescreen monitors, which revealed two problems with
my application of Fitts' Law in this environment.

The first problem is that the sheer number of side to side pixels in a
pair of 1920x1200 LCD panels seems to be a bit too many to easily zoom
a mouse across. My mouse pointer generally winds up in the middle of
the right hand display; getting it to the top left corner of the left
display was no longer anything like a little flick of the wrist. The
second problem is that the top left corner was sufficiently physically
far off to the side that it was no longer an easy casual action to
glance at it to see if there was anything with new output that I needed
to deiconify; I was less glancing off a bit and more peering off into
the distance.

(I had my old dual displays relatively flat against each other, but I
think that I probably need to move the new displays into a much more
pronounced V shape.)

My current solution to this issue exploits Fitts' Law once again.  The
often-overlooked fifth easy to reach location is 'where the mouse is
right now', or failing that 'some large area very near where the mouse
is'. So I've created a new [[mouse button binding MyFvwmButtonBindings]]
for my window manager; if the mouse is over the root window, hitting the
left button with Shift+Control now de-iconifies the (alphabetically)
first terminal window.  My mouse is frequently parked over the root
window and when it's not there's generally an exposed patch of the root
window close to it.

(Technically the binding toggles the window's iconified state, which
means that I can flip the first window back and forth from iconified to
not. This is a great way to fidget.)

To deal with the 'too far to look' issue and to make things in [[my
terminal windows taskbar HowIUseFvwmIconMan]] easier to reach in general,
I've repositioned it so that it's at the top left corner of my second
(right) display; this puts it more or less in the center of my overall
workspace and makes it easier to both reach and look at.  I don't think
this move away from a screen corner is a loss for Fitts' Law because
everything except the first window already had to be targeted carefully.

Of course, now I just have to train myself out of a many years habit
of reflexively looking and going to the top left of the left display.
This shouldn't take too long, right?

(What I'd really like to do is duplicate [[my taskbar equivalent
HowIUseFvwmIconMan]] in the top left of both displays. Unfortunately
this isn't possible right now with my window manager.)

PS: I experimented briefly with increasing the mouse acceleration (which
would make everything effectively closer) but didn't like the effects
it had on my ability to target things with the mouse in general; I kept
overshooting and missing stuff.  Possibly I would have acclimatized with
time and I just gave up too soon.