Trackpad: When zooming, disable selection of values in a dropdown in the Node Editor
Edit:
Thanks to maxime1's comment, I realized that the issue is specific to using a trackpad (at least on a Mac) vs. using a scroll wheel on a mouse. On the Mac, in order to zoom in and out you have to hold the control key and use two fingers. This puts you into a mode where the values will be silently altered if you aren't super careful where you place your cursor before zooming.
I am updating the title of this post to more accurately reflect this. I am also updating the contents of the original post below to be more accurate.
Original (with edits):
Right now if you put your mouse over a dropdown menu on a node in the node editor, using ctrl-two finger zoom on a trackpad will change the value.
So if you accidentally have your mouse over a dropdown menu and then try to zoom in or out of your network what actually happens is you change the network instead. For example, you can change an add node to a multiply node. And if you aren't observant, either you won't notice that you changed your network, or you will notice, but not know what the original setting was (hopefully undo can help you there).
At the least, we should be able to turn this functionality off. Or it should be disabled completely for any editors where a trackpad ctrl-two finger is used for zooming. Either way, the current behavior allows for easy, accidental (and unintentional) modification of your scene.
7 Comments
I do not have this issue. For me the value of the menu only changes if I hold CTRL + Scroll which is convenient to me at least.
Thanks for your input. I had to go back and try to figure out why I am having the issue when others aren't. It turns out that the issue comes when you are using Blender on a trackpad. In order to zoom in and out (at least on a Mac) you need to hold down the control key and use two fingers. That leads to this divergent behavior depending on where your mouse is when you zoom.
I will update the original post to indicate this special case.
This has never been a problem for me, and I mean as in when I scroll over a dropdown in a node editor it just zooms just like you want to without changing the value in the dropdown. Is this already an option somewhere maybe?
After Maxime1 posted above I had to do a little more digging and it turns out that this is an issue when using a trackpad (at least on a Mac). Normally it doesn't affect things when using a mouse.
Possible solution for both (for and against this idea) is that scrolling values should be disabled at certain zoom level or when mouse cursor is placed on top of certain font size.
...you can't just be more observant of where you're putting your mouse?
Not terribly helpful. The UI is clearly broken in this case.
This behavior changes an expected operation into a silently destructive one simply based on mouse position (and we are talking a few pixels, not moving your mouse into an entirely different panel).
Now, when I am trying to work quickly I have the added cognitive load of tracking my cursor to the pixel when trying to zoom. The UI could easily handle this, but it currently fails to do so.