The cursor drag deadzone is too small for small tablet areas

[Micha-ohne-el]

The problem

I personally use a very small tablet area, meaning a small movement of the pen results in a fairly large movement of the cursor in the game. When I want to tap something in the UI (most prominently a mapset in song select), very often instead of tapping the item, osu! will instead initiate a drag or scroll.
This is because the drag deadzone is so small that I can barely keep my pen still enough to keep the cursor inside of it when tapping. This is especially bad when I'm shaky and nervous, sometimes I literally have to grab the pen with two hands just to be able to tap anything.

My thoughts

I thought about this and I personally think the drag deadzone should fundamentally be different depending on the input device.

If you're using a mouse, you probably need next to no deadzone at all because you can keep the mouse very still¹. On the other hand, a tablet could have a deadzone that is dependent on the tablet area set in the game settings. In a perfect world the deadzone would be always the same physical size, as in the physical distance on the tablet surface, but I'm not sure how practical that is.

There could also be a toggle setting that would enlarge the deadzone across the board. This could be a nice accessibility setting for people who naturally tend to be a bit shaky or have low-quality hardware that makes the cursor shake a lot (like a shitty mouse on a shitty mouse pad). This could work in tandem with the above, of course.

I think a good compromise between complexity and usefulness would be to just decrease the deadzone when using a mouse and increase it when using a tablet. That would certainly address my personal issues and it would (hopefully) be fairly easy to implement.

Let me know what you think.

Footnotes

1. One of my biggest frustrations with the editor right now is actually not being able to precisely move objects and slider anchors by small amounts. I often want to move an object by just one or two pixels but moving the mouse such a short distance doesn't start a drag yet, so I have to move further than I actually want and then guess where the object was originally and where I wanted it to go. Apparently pishifat has also noted that in Editor improvements #31263 here. This is made worse by an older change made in Fix slider control point dragging not correctly accounting for drag deadzone #11024, which should be reverted in my opinion. ↩

[Micha-ohne-el]

I made a little video to illustrate my point and show how annoying it can be:

2025-01-05_16-04-53_small.mp4

[peppy]

You're visually moving a huge distance on the screen. You'd require a HUGE deadzone to get the results you want. Maybe we make it configurable for this but I dunno, seems like maybe you should just use a mouse or change your tapping technique 😅

[vatei]

I'd like to add my two cents and say that even with a more reasonable tablet area, drag events get triggered more than I would want to, which is especially bad with notifications (as touched on here #29527)

[shiumano]

A word from a mobile player.
The phone screen is the same size or smaller than his tablet. And my fingers are not as sharp as a pen.
I am terribly frustrated by the same problem.

[Micha-ohne-el]

@peppy maybe reconsider? Seems like I'm not the only one having issues with this.

At the end of the day it kind of doesn't matter how large the distance is that the cursor moves, does it? As far as I'm concerned this whole entire feature solely exists to make sure inputs are interpreted like the user intended them to, and (at least for some users) it's not doing that right now.

I really think making different input methods have different deadzones is the way to go.

[peppy]

There's nothing to reconsider. I never said this wasn't under consideration.

Drag lenience is already being tracked elsewhere for different reasons.