Interaction discoverability

A discussion started in #1432 about how to help new users discover all the available interactions in our plots. Particularly the doubleclick interactions, which we’re adding a new one of there, but it could apply to some of the less obvious single-click interactions like clicking an axis end to type a new value, or dragging from the corner just outside the plot to zoom the corresponding ends of both x and y. We try to hint at these by changing the cursor when you happen to mouse over the region, but I’m not sure how many people notice that.

Doubleclick interactions we currently describe with Lib.notifier when you do some related thing, but nobody really likes them. They’re aimed at new users, but these users might not even notice them the one and only time they appear, while experienced users probably just get annoyed by them.

In prehistoric times we had what we called a “lightbox” that you could turn on to frame each clickable or draggable element in a colored box, adding correspondingly colored notes about what you could do in each box. We could resurrect something like that?

Would love to get some more input on this - @cldougl @delekru @chriddyp @jackparmer @etpinard any ideas?

[chriddyp]

I think that adding hints in the zoom and autoscale icons would be really helpful too.

Right now, it’s just this:

But what if it hinted at the shortcut too, like:

Zoom in
(click and drag)

Autoscale
(double click)

Pan
(shift, click, and drag)

[jamesmstone]

As an interim, is it possible to completely hide/disable the notifier?

In my eyes, a nice solution would be to allow custom styles and or messages. Maybe that functionality could be provided by an event, so should one choose, they could create their own notifier.

As an aside: Thanks for a great library!