Middle-Click Paste? Not For Long 729
An anonymous reader writes "Select to copy and middle-click to paste. That's very convenient usability feature associated with UNIX graphical environments. But it is confusing for new users, so the ability to middle-click paste was briefly removed from GNOME 3.10. It was restored few days later, but with clear message: middle-click paste will be permanently removed from next GNOME version." I hope that "we'll defer this change until the next cycle" also means that it's getting re-thought, rather than just delayed.
GNOME: We don't want Microsoft to have all the FUN (Score:5, Funny)
The GNOME guys are just jealous of Microsoft taking away the user interface elements that people were used to and they want to show that Open Source can do just a good a job of screwing up an interface as those big-bad corporate types!
Re:GNOME: We don't want Microsoft to have all the (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:GNOME: We don't want Microsoft to have all the (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:GNOME: We don't want Microsoft to have all the (Score:5, Insightful)
it is redundant to have more than one type of copy buffer
Redundant but useful. You have two eyes, but in concert they provide binocular vision. You have two ears, but together they allow you to locate sound sources. On macs back in 1995-1999, I used a program that would provide 10 copy buffers. Very handy utility, that. Today, I like knowing that I have at least two copy buffers without having to resort to opening a text editor as a poor-man's buffer.
Re:GNOME: We don't want Microsoft to have all the (Score:5, Informative)
This is why you should be using KDE, not Gnome. In KDE, you have an applet (it's part of the standard build) called "Klipper"; it's a LIFO buffer of everything you Ctrl-C or highlight. You can then click on the scissors icon in your tool tray to look at the buffer and select something from it, which can then be pasted with ctrl-V or middle-click. The default buffer size is 10 entries, but that can be manually set to whatever value you like.
Re:GNOME: We don't want Microsoft to have all the (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:GNOME: We don't want Microsoft to have all the (Score:5, Insightful)
Lowest common denominator design will lead to a low quality production.
This. A thousand times over. It's at the root of deteriorating software on so many levels, not just in the UI. It's fine to abstract, but abstractions should also have a way to query capabilities of the particular underlying system and make them available should the user of the abstraction wish to utilize them on that system.
Re:GNOME: We don't want Microsoft to have all the (Score:4, Interesting)
MATE, personally. I've used XFCE4 in the past, but still has just a few too many rough edges for me.
Surprisingly, MATE did rather well in his tests, here. Better than XFCE4. Shame MATE still isn't ported to ARM.
http://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/a-memory-comparison-of-light-linux-desktops/ [wordpress.com]
Re:GNOME: We don't want Microsoft to have all the (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know that they're jealous.
Just make it a setting. But not the default.
Re:GNOME: We don't want Microsoft to have all the (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the problem with Ubuntu is similar to the problem at M$. They feel that they have to make UI changes (they call them improvements) to show the end user it's not the same old thing.
I've really been wondering why a company doesn't just build something like litestep (basically a module loader and a large collection of modules) and continually beef each shell module's capability. Come up with a new layout each release to prove to people you're changing, while leaving old layouts around for people who liked them better.
Even the tech support guy not knowing how to tell you to do things over the phone would be no worse than it was with previous OS iterations "switch to '98 interface then click the gray bar" or they could now do the whole remote desktop thing.
Re:GNOME: We don't want Microsoft to have all the (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.highrez.co.uk/downloads/XMouseButtonControl.htm [highrez.co.uk]
That thing has layer (I think of them as profiles) support so you can have five custom mouse configs all stored and ready at the... yes... click of a mouse. Very handy.
Re:GNOME: We don't want Microsoft to have all the (Score:5, Insightful)
All XFCE has to do is not fuck up.
Dear XFCE, Please: just DON'T FUCK IT UP. Thanks.
Christ, at this stage the revived CDE is more appealing than GNOME. Zippy as hell on modern hardware, too ('cos it doesn't do anything).
Re: (Score:3)
Are you suggesting they've been elopping Linux for so many years? Looks like Linux is more robust than Nokia but it's showing some cracks. They'll have to walk over my cold body to take away middle click paste from me. There will always be patches that restore it or some other sane DE.
Re:GNOME: We don't want Microsoft to have all the (Score:5, Informative)
Shocking, I know, but all scroll wheel mice are three button mice. If you click down on that scroll wheel instead of scrolling it, you get the third button click.
FUCK OFF (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, these guys need to just fuck off.
Linux is a very nice system, or was until they got their hands on it.
Now it's becoming a cheap-ass knockoff of some nasty hybrid of OSX and Windows with all the unique and useful features removed.
Seriously guys, if you want MacOS just buy a fucking Mac and stop breaking shit in Linux.
Re:FUCK OFF (Score:5, Informative)
They're breaking Gnome, not Linux. The nice thing about Linux is that you can configure everything exactly how you want it. Maybe try MATE [mate-desktop.org]?
Re:FUCK OFF (Score:4, Informative)
They're breaking Gnome, not Linux. The nice thing about Linux is that you can configure everything exactly how you want it. Maybe try MATE?
Yeah, I know Gnome isn't all of Linux, but it has a lot of influence and a lot of popular programs are tied into the infrastructure. This is why so many programs seem to have forgotten the concept of cwd recently.
Other than that, I'll stick with FVWM.
Re:FUCK OFF (Score:4, Funny)
They're breaking Gnome, not Linux. The nice thing about Linux is that you can configure everything exactly how you want it. Maybe try MATE?
Yeah, I know Gnome isn't all of Linux, but it has a lot of influence and a lot of popular programs are tied into the infrastructure. This is why so many programs seem to have forgotten the concept of cwd recently.
Other than that, I'll stick with FVWM.
A direct descendant of TWM!
Re: (Score:3)
I started with twm at DEC (there was a decwindows version). then tvtwm. then fvwm. and I've been using fvwm for over 20 yrs now (or it sure seems like it).
I try 'desktops' from time to time but they don't really give me much beyond managing windows. you know, the thing that fvwm does well enough and with 1/10 the memory and cpu.
Re:FUCK OFF (Score:4, Insightful)
I try 'desktops' from time to time but they don't really give me much beyond managing windows. you know, the thing that fvwm does well enough and with 1/10 the memory and cpu.
A lot of 'desktops' these days are things you don't see immediately; the toolkits, internationalization/localization, canvases, setting centralization and management, advanced font handling, notification plumbing etc. that most GUI applications make use of these days (from one desktop or another). Presuming you're using apps other than xterm (and perhaps you are not) you are actually making use of most of this stuff; the part of the `desktop`you`re not using is simply the window manager and the panels which are, ultimately, the tip of the iceberg.
Re:FUCK OFF (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they are breaking Linux.
The GNOME people have managed to invade several core projects such as udev and have been busy working to integrate them with GNOME. In addition, they are trying to push the GNOME-centric Wayland to replace X.
Removing middle click paste is just the latest example of their arrogance. The GNOME developers generally adopt the attitude that the user is an idiot who can't wipe their own ass without one of them to help. Anytime you complain about a removed feature you are either "using it wrong" or GNOME was "not designed for users who wish to do X". If they kept to their own little corner, I would not have as much of a problem but they are doing their damnedest to turn the entire Linux ecosystem into one giant mess without any regards for the UNIX philosophy or even compatibility with other *nix systems such as the BSDs.
Re:FUCK OFF (Score:4, Funny)
give them a little pop-up saying "hey, there's a faster way to do that, do you want to try?" and give them a basic tutorial on how to do so, ending with an option to turn off the feature if they wish.
In other words, a context-sensitive help system like "Clippy."
Re:FUCK OFF (Score:4, Informative)
No, the mentality prevalent in GNOME is pretty much breaking the OS and other upstream projects they touch as well. Perhaps not the kernel proper, since those devs are hardcore, but that's not all we mean when we say "linux" these days. It's probably not GNOME's "fault" as much as that's just where things tend to come to a head; it's a hotspot of non-unix-like inclinations.
(I say this after going through huge trouble to uncouple JACK from the display system/DBUS and restore it to it's proper place as a daemon. Unfortunately this gets harder every year because contributers to projects like JACK seem to more and more often view everything through the desktop lens and fail to realize that on a UNIX-like system securing a soundcard with a few DRM/SHM regions for shared use by the system and multiple users should be childsplay.)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
At the risk of starting a war, KDE is the flagship linux desktop.
Re:FUCK OFF (Score:4, Interesting)
As a KDE user, I would prefer that to be true. Experience has shown me otherwise.
Re:FUCK OFF (Score:5, Insightful)
bash is the flagship Linux desktop.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Personal experience says Red Hat/CentOS and Fedora are the most widespread. I know a total of three Ubuntu users (one of which uses awesome instead of Unity), no Mint users, and a very large number of RH/FC users (through their workplace mostly). My friends (who do not share a work place with me) would report a similar statistic.
Re:FUCK OFF (Score:5, Insightful)
There is one problem: for historic reasons, most distributions install Gnome by default. This needs to be fixed, badly.
Re: (Score:3)
Actually, it needs to be fixed, well.
Installing Gnome is an example of fixing something badly.
OTOH, installing Windows is an example of breaking something. Whether you consider it doing this well or badly is subject to debate.
Re:FUCK OFF (Score:5, Funny)
There is one problem: for historic reasons, most distributions install Gnome by default. This needs to be fixed, badly.
Well, it seems the folks over at GNOME are trying as hard as they can to get it fixed...
The mythical "new user" (Score:4, Interesting)
Two questions:
1) How many "new users" did they actually talk to?
2) How many GNOME users are there, and of those users, how many are "new"?
It sounds to me like they're removing a feature that millions of people use, on a whim.
Re:The mythical "new user" (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's why I'm done with Gnome. They keep doing stupid things and trying to tell me it's for my own good.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Two questions:
1) How many "new users" did they actually talk to?
Zero. They are however losing a lot of "old" users
2) How many GNOME users are there, and of those users, how many are "new"?
Very few. Considering Linux's low desktop market share and the diverse number of DE's I would guess GNOME's userbase to be slightly larger than the number of developers creating it.
It sounds to me like they're removing a feature that millions of people use, on a whim.
I wouldn't say millions. Maybe thousands but certainly not millions. Most people have moved to the ctrl+c and ctrl+v mechanism because it apes Windows and MacOSX. I used to use middle click a lot back in the 90's but ctrl+c is now simpler for me to use since I bounce between platf
Re: (Score:3)
Really, how many windows users have ever clicked the middle mouse button or scroll wheel?
The defection rate from windows is at max 1%. How many of those users will have highlighted text and then at some point later actually clicked their scroll wheel? That is going to be a very small number. How many of them will be so confused that they won't think, "how does this work" or "ok, don't click the scroll wheel?"
It is a non-starter. GNOME removes features and then comes up with whatever justification they want
Re:FUCK OFF (Score:4, Insightful)
Now it's becoming a cheap-ass knockoff of some nasty hybrid of OSX and Windows with all the unique and useful features removed.
I have been worried about this trend too. When I have been dabbling with Unity and GNOME3 I usually need to resort to things like "GNOME Tweak Tool" or editing some setting file by hand to achieve what I need. Put an actual "advanced settings" category for this stuff, and stop this race to the bottom in terms of who removes the most of the settings and features.
Re: (Score:3)
This.
Stop already with making BS decisions on what I want - let me configure it the way I want.
Re the article, I've never used middle-click paste, I used it to roll up the window until the wheel click switch died on my mouse.
For me, going back to ST days, it was always left-click place cursor, left-click and drag to select, right-click to context menu to select cut or copy, then go somewhere and select position with left-click then right-click to paste.
The comment earlier on UI and UX was right on. Give me
Re:FUCK OFF (Score:5, Insightful)
How exactly is Gnome remotely like either OS X or Windows other than at some extremely superficial level?
Er, that's about the only way. The developers of GNOME seem to have some awful kind of Mac envy. Previously when Windows was king, they had some awful kind of Windows envy. The result is not good.
I know plenty of OS X users and none of them would ever touch Gnome 3 with a 50 foot pole.
I said it's lake a nasty cheap knockoff, not a nice cheap knockoff :)
Re: (Score:3)
I think you missed my point. No user of OS X or Windows would ever think Gnome 3 was either of those products.
I think you're missing my point. I'm not claiming that a Windows or OSX user would confuse GNOME 3 with either of those products. Much like the user of a Rolux where the second hand goes backwards us not going to confuse the Rolux with a real Rolex.
It looks and behaves like neither of them. Sure, Gnome 3 has a few features that are slightly similar to a few features in the other two but that's abou
Right. (Score:5, Informative)
I hope that "we'll defer this change until the next cycle" also means that it's getting re-thought, rather than just delayed.
If you have any hope of that, you've obviously not actually used Gnome for any length of time. Considering their users is not something that Gnome designers seem to have any desire to do.
Make it an option, PLEASE!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Please, please, PLEASE make this an option, not a full removal.
I will stop using GNOME if this ability is fully removed.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Make it an option, PLEASE!!! (Score:5, Informative)
From that link:
The middle-click will be used to start selections, and provide text contextual menus (such as word definitions, sharing, etc.)
This is more "break the desktop in favor of tablet behavior" stupidity.
Re:Make it an option, PLEASE!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
The middle-click will be used to start selections, and provide text contextual menus
Isn't that what the right button already does?
Re: (Score:3)
I noticed that, too. $DIETY only knows what abomination they have planned for the right mouse button.
Re:Make it an option, PLEASE!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
I will stop using GNOME if this ability is fully removed.
I think that is what they want. They have succeeded in driving me away to XFCE, which is actually quite good and does everything I need. To me GNOME is like a solar flare, quite impressive at first, but then fading out as it gets higher and higher from the surface of the sun. They are in a little bubble floating off into space, becoming more and more irrelevant to normal Linux users. Maybe they will meet an alien civilization some day who will understand what they are trying to do.
Re:Make it an option, PLEASE!!! (Score:4, Informative)
I switched to MATE and have a fully functional desktop again.
Re:Make it an option, PLEASE!!! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Make it an option, PLEASE!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, how hard can it be to maintain a fork of a major desktop environment for the sake of a single feature?
Re: (Score:3)
carefully controlled studies
Citation needed. I remember when we discovered for all their bleating about tablet UIs, they had clearly literally never tested GNOME on an actual tablet [slashdot.org]
No thanks (Score:3)
Just another reason not to use GNOME. Hopefully the Xorg people don't start thinking this is a useless feature. I'm still finding myself trying to hit CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to kill X, or CTRL-ALT-+ to zoom in. These were very useful features that were dropped for no good reason at all.
Re:No thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
CTRL+ALT++ or - were NOT to zoom in or out. Those keystrokes switched between desktop resolutions.
They switched between display resolutions, without affecting the desktop resolution. If you had a 1600x1200 desktop and hit CTRL-ALT-+ to get 1024x768, it would display a subset of your large desktop, just larger. You could pan around the large desktop as needed. It was, in effect, a zoom.
Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
One more reason to try LXDE, MATE or Cinnamon.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Mate is my pick. At one point I like the simplicity of Blackbox but it does require a bit of configuration. I then moved to XFCE and I currently use Mate.
To me the gnome 2.0 desktop was perfect. I could cram a bunch of stuff in the top bar like date/time/weather/disk usage/cpu & ram usage/network traffic and quick launch icons. And all of my running programs are at the bottom. Mate continues that trend and it works nicely for me.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
revenge (Score:5, Funny)
If I ever build a killbot, it will be activated by the phrase "confusing to users."
Re: (Score:3)
Gnome? Not for long (Score:3)
Actually, I've already ditched Gnome. I liked Gnome 2, but so many of the features I liked and actually used were removed for Gnome 3 that I finally bit the bullet and just switched to XFCE. I miss some of the features of Gnome 2, but not Gnome 3.
And if I hadn't, removing middle button paste and not even making it an option would have run me off even faster. At least I spent some time trying to like Gnome 3 before giving up.
Seriously, they can have my middle mouse button paste when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Re: (Score:3)
Cinnamon here, but same basic theory. My anger about gnome 3 has decreased significantly since switching. I look at these threads more with amusement than with rage at this point.
If you are still on gnome3 and angry, it's really worth getting out while the getting is good.
Too fucking bad (Score:5, Interesting)
The only result that this will have is either
1.) derivative products adding it back in or
2.) users moving to a different platform
Wake up idiots!!! Do you see how many forks of your project exist these days? That's because they have no other means to fix your broken products. Gnome is becoming un-recommendable as a desktop for all their idiotic design decisions. From now on, your options are KDE if you want a qt-based setup or Xfce/LXDE if you want gtk. Gnome no longer exists to me.
Re:Too fucking bad (Score:5, Informative)
If you want gtk, you also have two more options, Cinnamon and MATE. I actually really fell in love with MATE (GNOME2 continued and being slowly rewritten, optimized and decrapped), it's more polished *and* leaner + faster than e.g. XFCE.
Optimizing for new users is a one-way street... (Score:5, Insightful)
Such optimizing things for new users — while pessimizing the experience for others — is a trap. This is exactly, how you end-up with a dumbed-down system — whether it is an OS, or a user-interface for anything. Easy to get started — maybe, you'll achieve that. Hard to keep going — this one will likely be yours...
Easier for two months, harder for 20 years. mama (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. The user-to-user interface, such as English, is so complex that no-one can ever learn 100% of a language, and the benefit of that is that it enormously powerful.
If we wanted interfaces that were so simple you could learn the whole thing in two weeks, we'd all be speaking in baby talk. What people want is an interface where you can learn the BASICS quickly, then keep learning more forever.
When you dumb down the interface, you're choosing to make the first two months of use easier, at the expense of making the next 20 years of use more difficult.
That's dumb X 120.
Two independent cut and paste clipboards is great (Score:5, Interesting)
Where the middle button shines, is when one need to copy and paste two pieces of junk from one window to another:
Select the first part, Ctrl-C, select the second part, then move on the target window and Ctrl-V to paste the first part and middle click to paste the second part.
There's no way one can easily do this without the middle button paste. Is there ?
(and desktop clipboard history isn't very ergonomic, last time I tried)
I must admit I don't use this feature very often, but I like it a lot when it comes handy.
Remove CTRL + C as well (Score:5, Funny)
They should just remove CTRL + C and CTRL + V as well while they are at it. Not only is it not very discoverable, but it also requires you to use the keyboard. Drag and Drop is so much better and obviously the correct way to do copy paste.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
CTRL + C and CTRL + V have been confusing the hell out of users since 1993.
'Press control? I don't see a control key. Oh, CTRL I see it now. Ok, I pressed CTRL and then C but nothing happened. What? I have to hold it down. OK... I'm holding down CTRL and C and V but nothing's happening. What? Hold CTRL and press C, then release them? Ok. I did that and the same with CTRL and V but now I have the wrong word two times together at the top of the document. My computer is definitely not working. Can you come up
Because, Gnome (Score:3)
I find it fascinating that a group of people would actually consider removing this entire piece of functionality the better option in lieu of simply making it a configuration item.
And the problem with this being configurable is... (Score:3)
I mean, sure... I can understand it being difficult for new users to adapt to. I can even understand it being removed as a default behavior out of the box, but why can't the feature just be a configurable setting in the window manager's properties file?
Re:And the problem with this being configurable is (Score:5, Insightful)
You sir, sound like you are expecting an answer from reasonable people.
The GNOME 3 devs have a better than 3 year track record of showing that they are NOT reasonable people. No screen savers, no-left pane in a file manager, or being able to blank your screen instead of sleeping when you close the lid on your laptop. These are features that have been removed with no way to add the functionality back in (xscreensaver and moving to Nemo don't count). These are not the decisions of reasonable people. They have shut the door on these features, and if someone finds a way to hack them in, they then remove the backdoors that allow for that. They are damn serious about making this stuff go away and in their arrogance and hubris believe that they know better than you what you want and need to be productive in a desktop environment.
This is Gnome's problem, not mine (Score:5, Insightful)
Awesome! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is totally awesome. Gnome has been taunting me for years, continuously demolishing perfectly fine functionality I use daily, but at the same time just not taking it far enough for me to permanently switch. Not anymore though; this will definitely make me switch to some other desktop environment. Awesome. I'm happy for this loss:-)
Obama (Score:3)
Well, yea but, how can we make this Obama's fault?
Yes, of course ... (Score:3)
But it is confusing for new users, ... [so] middle-click paste will be permanently removed ...
Because new users are new forever and can never learn anything. /sarcasm
The feature I miss most from RISC OS... (Score:3)
...is the ability to right-click to select a menu option and keep the damn menu open.
I've given up on doing this in Windows, but is this doable in any of the Linux desktop environments? And by "doable," I mean an easy to enable option that doesn't involve recompiling the kernel or burying my grandmother in soft peat for three months.
Re:three? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:three? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:three? (Score:5, Funny)
A lot of devices become incredibly annoying with Jim Beam hand.
Re:three? (Score:5, Informative)
Stop buying cheap mice then? All the mice I've bought over the last 5 years have all had great scroll wheel clickers.
Re: (Score:3)
I remember this effect the first few times I used a wheel mouse. It didn't take long to learn to press in a certain way (angle) so there's no scrolling. Is there something in more recent mice that makes this harder?
I know what you mean. I also could find the certain angle in which to click the button in older mice, but there really seems to be something in the more recent mice that makes this harder. Could be that the scroll wheel is positioned higher, that is one guess.
<rant>Every year, we seem to have fewer keys on the keyboard and more widgets on the mouse. For example, on most laptops we've lost PgUp/Dn keys and the arrow keys keep shrinking, probably because a wheel mouse is supposed to do the same thing. I predict that some day they don't sell keyboards any more, but a typical mouse will have 102 buttons.</rant>
The Ducky Mini [fbcdn.net] is an interesting case as it omits arrow keys completely.
Re:three? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:three? (Score:5, Funny)
As much as i applaud Apple for finding homes for physically challenged mice, that doesn't mean the rest of the mice should have to wear sandbags.
Diana Moon Glampers: UX Designer (Score:5, Insightful)
Diana Moon Glampers as a UX designer. That explains a lot, actually.
I miss the days when it was UI - the user's interface with the computer. An interface. The thing that makes it possible to make the computer do what you want it to do. Design it for maximum functionality with minimal interference.
Somewhere along the line it became UX - the experience. The fluff. The marketing. Doesn't matter if it's functional or not as long as it feels good. You're not allowed to learn anything, you're not allowed to even know how it works. There's nothing to master. Just one button that says "Make it look like whatever the other UX people think is fashionable this year."
In Windows-land, we lost (unless you hack the registry) focus-follows-mouse from XP to 7, and the ability to resize an arbitrary number of windows when we went from 7 to Metro. In Web-land, we lost Firefox. In GNOME-land, we're about to lose middle-click-to-paste. (I probably shouldn't have mentioned focus-follows-mouse, or they'll take that too.)
First they hide the feature. They they claim telemetry says nobody uses it. Then they take it away. (Never mind the fact that the sort of user who does use the feature either delays the upgrade, hacks around the limitation, and is likely to pre-emptively disable telemetry as a matter of course.)
We used to be Emperors and Empresses over our machines. Now that any fool can design a UX, we have UIs designed by fools for fools. It's all kind of mixed up in my mind, but the past five years of change for change's sake have been a doozy.
Re: (Score:3)
In Windows-land, we lost (unless you hack the registry) focus-follows-mouse from XP to 7
It was a registry hack in XP [blogspot.com] (of a binary flag no less, how's that for arcane configuration?). In 9x it was a PowerToy [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:3)
First they hide the feature. They they claim telemetry says nobody uses it. Then they take it away. (Never mind the fact that the sort of user who does use the feature either delays the upgrade, hacks around the limitation, and is likely to pre-emptively disable telemetry as a matter of course.)
What did you think that the telemetry was there for? Now you know. Stop disabling it if you want the features that you use to continue to be included.
Re:three? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually Apple OSX Terminal.app has middle-click paste... Oh, joy!
Re: (Score:3)
By the way, i've never heard L+R called a third button click.
Re: (Score:3)
Also, what prevents you from ignoring it if you don't like it?
Re:That's it. Then I will stop using GNOME. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:LOL (Score:5, Funny)
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
In windows 7 explorer, pressing 'alt' will give you the old menus back - and the toolbars were moved to the start menu.
No idea where they went in WIndows 8. My experience with windows 8 primarily involved getting a refund.
Re:Probably a good thing (Score:5, Informative)
Let me guess: You have never used it.
This feature is so mind-boggingly *convenient* I really don't know how to work without it.
No, using ^C ^V is not an alternative – I use *both*, because it gives me *two* clipboards to work with.
Re: (Score:3)
You must have misunderstood how it works in classic X apps. You read as if you have never used it in X.
Paste-on-middle-click pastes into the text area that you middle-click on, and nowhere else.
The mechanism is also separate from the usual Cut/Copy/Paste functionality. Middle-click is used to paste the selected text, not what is on the clipboard. It is very fast and convenient, done completely with the mouse. The modality is not broken.
Re: (Score:3)
First off it's not a 'paste'that is a construct from a quite different paradigm. It's a 'yank.' There is no copying and there is no pasting, it simply yanks the highlighted text into position at the mouse pointer. That's actually a pretty fundamental command that is performed often by users of all experience levels. Removing it would probably really outrage a lot of their users except that they have already driven away all the users that have a clue years ago.
Re:Probably a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a very timely article for me. I installed Linux a week ago for a person with a junked copy of Windows Seven. To give you an idea of their technical expertise. They knew how to copy a URL from the address bar in a browser with right-click-copy and then go to a different tab, and right-click-paste to place the text in an email. So I get a call last night and she wanted to know how to do it in Linux. It had not even crossed her mind that a right-click might give her a context menu with the cut/copy/paste options. She is that computer illiterate. I mentioned ctrl-c ctrl-v, but she does not like the keyboard.
Then I remembered how much easier I find doing it the Unix way and why I hate getting stuck on Windows. Select then middles click is second nature to me. So I showed her how to do it. It took about 30 seconds to show her, and another minute or two to do it again and then let her do it. Funny thing is, she picked right up on it. It is NOT a confusing thing to a new Linux user. It is a useful feature and a good differentiator from Windows.
GNOME seems to want to remove any feature in Linux that makes Linux better than Windows.
Re: (Score:3)
>GNOME seems to want to remove any feature in Linux that makes Linux better than Windows.
Fine. Help "remove" their fucking user base. :-)
Slashdotters have a lot of influence on new Linux users, so slam GNOME and discourage adoption in any way you can. GNOME will not be fixed, GNOME leadership don't give a fuck about you, me, or anyone not them, so help dry up the user base and guide new users to friendly distros which use a DE you like.
Reward the good, shun the bad, spread the word to reinforce the good.
Re:I hate Select to copy. (Score:5, Insightful)
The selection buffer and the clipboard are two entirely different things. Selecting text does not screw up the clipboard accessed with ctrl-c/ctrl-v.
I too highlight words all the time. Constantly. Not only to keep track of where I am, but just to fidget. I've never encountered a problem with unwanted text in the clipboard.
Re: (Score:3)
It's when you're copy/pasting between two terminals, or between a terminal and browser that the middle-click gets nice.
In a terminal there was no right-click or ctrl-v/ctrl-c to begin with. You can use mouse pasting in VT text terminals too (ctrl-alt-F1, ctrl-al-F2 etc. or just no X11 server running) if the gpm daemon is installed. It uses right-clicking then.
Re: (Score:3)
What are the rules for "current selection"? Does it include any echo of most recently, but not now highlighted? Highlighted in a windows that is the the active window?
rules:
In general any selectable text in any window is good (though there are very very few exceptions and they annoy the fuck out of you when they don't work. Code::blocks, I'm looking at you).
Source must exist when middleclick-paste takes place, so you can't deselect (i think) or close before pasting somewhere else. Clipboard managers modify default behavior and add more persistence to the copied content.
Voila.
If you want to understand how these buffers work, install xsel and use xsel -po/-so/-bo to print