emojis for mouse buttons?

Tue Dec 31 13:30:58 CST 2019

How about the following.

Expand Philippe's idea of the theta shape to having a three by three 
grid of cells, rounded at the two lower outside corners to suggest the 
shape of a mouse unit. The three columns left to right referring to the 
left button, the centre button and the right button respectively.

For each button column, there is an upper cell, a middle cell and a 
lower cell.

A filled upper cell to mean click,

a filled upper cell and a filled middle cell to mean double click,

a filled lower cell to mean mouse down,

a filled middle cell to mean mouse up,

a filled lower cell and a filled middle cell to mean mouse down then 
drag.

So, at present, fifteen new emoji characters.

In use a mouse down then drag symbol would be used followed by a mouse 
up symbol later.

The grid could be one colour and the cell fill another colour if 
desired, but the design would also be unambiguous in monochrome as a 
display default.

William Overington

Tuesday 31 December 2019

------ Original Message ------
From: "Philippe Verdy via Unicode" <unicode at unicode.org>
To: "Shriramana Sharma" <samjnaa at gmail.com>
Cc: "unicode Unicode Discussion" <unicode at unicode.org>
Sent: Tuesday, 2019 Dec 31 At 15:49
Subject: Re: emojis for mouse buttons?

I say "emoji" because they would belong to the subsets of emojis, within 
characters, and existing mouse characters (but not button-specific) are 
already encoded as emojis (i.e. two styles: basic glyphs or color 
icons).

What is important is less the mouse than the identification of the 
button (left/center/right) for documenting keymaps in UI (the 
documentation usually indicate the default right-hand assignment, a user 
may still configure the mouse driver to swap the left/right buttons).

For now the alternative is to compose a localisable string like "L" or 
"R" or "C", followed by the generic mouse (when documenting keymaps, the 
surrounding square and shading may be done outside using styling, we 
just need the unique symbol in a more immediately readable way than just 
"click".

A generic clic (1st button) is sometimes represented as an arrow cursor 
or hand with a pointing finger, and some radial strokes near the tip of 
the arrow, but it is not very distinctive when we need to explicitly 
disinguish the buttons, so I suggest a basic empty shape (rounded 
rectangle or ovoid like a narrow theta "Θ"), with the top part split in 
three cells by horizontal and vertical strokes, and one of the three 
cells filled (representing the wire or the wireless waves is not 
necessary).

Le mar. 31 déc. 2019 à 14:57, Shriramana Sharma <samjnaa at gmail.com 
<mailto:samjnaa at gmail.com> > a écrit :

Why are these called "emojis" for mouse buttons rather than just 
"characters" for them?

On Tue, 31 Dec, 2019, 18:45 Philippe Verdy via Unicode, 
<unicode at unicode.org <mailto:unicode at unicode.org> > wrote:

A lot of application need to document their keymap and want to display 
keys.

For now there are emojis for mouses (several variants: 1, 2 or 3 
buttons), independently of the button actually pressed.

However there's no simple emoji to represent the very common mouse click 
buttons used in lot of UI.

But it would be good to have emojis for the left, center, and right 
click (showing a mouse with the correct button filled in black), instead 
of writing "left click" in plain text.

Has it been proposed ?

See for example https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/ID/Shortcuts 
<https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/ID/Shortcuts>

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