I think that a big part of user interface improvement lies in re-examining old answers to still existing questions. For example: when do we really need to click the mouse?

Motivation

I think we could do with less mouse clicks. And if nothing else, a click-free mode you can turn on if you want to.

I don't know how many long surveys you've taken, but I find them daunting. My question is: why do we need to click to select?

I think the answer is that most people use their mouse pointer liberally and they think as long as I don't click anything, there's no way I can screw up. And thus introducing selection-on-mouseover would be too subtle, and too confusing.

So let's eliminate the confusion.

A mockup

This is a configuration dialog from Konqueror (slightly modded to just show the part I'm interested in). Nothing has happened here yet, this is how it looked when it came up.

Now I want to select the platform option, so I move my pointer over it and the dialog changes to look like this:

The option I selected has become blue, which tells me that this option has been modified.

The two buttons OK and Apply have also become blue, which means that if I click one of them I confirm the modification I have made.

(Should it be necessary to click the buttons or can I just move the mouse over them? Let's go conservative for now and require a click.)

But suppose I don't want to turn on this option after all. I move my pointer away from it, and then I move it over it again:

The checkbox has become unchecked again, so the option is deselected. But since I considered turning it on, it's highlighted in yellow to tell me that I thought about it.

Also, the Defaults button is now highlighted, to show that the current settings correspond to the defaults. It's highlighted green to tell me that I have re-entered the default settings.

All good?

One problem that comes to mind is this. If I move my pointer over the dialog I select every option unless I'm very careful:

One solution could be to set a certain interval during which the pointer has to be on the option I want to select. For example half a second. This would be configurable, of course.