if there was a standard that described the expected behavior of commonly used (or just useful) knob control methods, perhaps in the form of a short draft specification on freedesktop.org, would people (ie developers) use it? expectations and requirements clearly differ so we would probably need to gather together and discuss those in use with a mind to removing or combining similar methods, explicitly naming them and defining their behavior in the abstract. if we required that applications implement a set few methods as configurable options (as a minimum) in order to comply then we might eventually see the back of the unpredictable mess we have now. it wouldn't matter how they are configured, be it gconf, dotfile, command line, prefs dialog, env variable.. as long as it could be done. worth thinking about or is it just too niche? are the actual real world applications too varied and specific to make it useful? for example it would certainly be nice to crack open a library config or application prefs window and assign VLMC (vertical linear motion control*) to the left mouse button and RMC (radial motion control*) to shift + left mouse button, and have those conform to the expected standards. or even just to set KNOB_CONTROL_METHOD=RMC in your global environment and have all the adherent applications just do what you expect. it seems to me that standards (of the mutually agreed rather than officially sanctioned variety, since the latter is impractical) provide the best means to bring about common behavior in sovereign systems. naturally it would be completely platform independent. just having named control methods with explicitly defined behavior may help matters too. cheers, pete. *crappy names i'm sure, but you get the idea.