Dwight wrote:
...not the enthusiasm of a newbie discovering his twenty-fifth appendage.
Now Dwight, you can't say something like that AND expect to have the last word...
I have had RSI, so I'm very, very aware of input efficiency, and have a need to off-load work from my mouse hand. I'm not just looking at time taken to move a hand from one place to the next, but the degree to which muscles and nerves are used repetitively, and unnecessarily. Overall, I'm not about to suggest a less efficient way of working.
Yes, I'm aware of keyboard scrolling. It's downfalls are:
1) Arrow keys are located on the right of keyboard, 3 times further away from my left hand, which sits mostly doing my most frequently used keyboard shortcuts, customised as to be all available on the left side of the keyboard. My SpaceNavigator is just the basic knob-only version, not any other version that has other surrounding buttons that stop it sitting right next to my ESC key, barely a left-handed pivot away.
2) Multiple keystrokes are needed - particularly for navigating to a diagonally offset target.
3) It has no subtlety of control. Hold a button down for keyboard repeat and it's easy to over/undershoot your target.
I also use my Views well, as you suggest, but take the attached example, of a corner of a room. Say I was placing a Floor Covering, using a rectangular construction method for a slab. I need to get in that close to pick the correct node. Navigating to the other corner of the room doesn't just take a few arrow keystrokes. Using the Navigator Preview window requires a detour movement to and from the palette, and a click-drag release movement. As opposed to a pivot of the left hand and a push on the SN knob, leaving the right mouse to zero in on the target - a move that can simultaneously overlap with the SN motion, for additional speed.
With the SpaceNavigator enabled in 2D, you could simultaneously zoom, pan and position the cursor on your next target in one smooth overlapping motion.
I don't actually think this additional functionality would take that long for a developer to implement - surely it's just a matter of gluing some input events to the inbuilt zoom and pan functions. I believe in the benefits of this enough that I've offered to give time freely to help implement an interim solution: see
this topic here, in the Developer's forum.