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.
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.
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.
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: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.
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.
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:5, Interesting)
Re:The mythical "new user" (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 platforms so much. I suspect a lot of people are the same way.
I'm not worried they removed it and I think the vast majority of people won't even notice but it didn't hurt anything being there. There was no reason to ditch it. GNOME devs have a serious problem with just letting people work they way they want to. That, to me, is inexcusable. Then again, I've always thought GNOME was fucking garbage, ever since that petulant little child Miguel started the project.
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:FUCK OFF (Score:4, Interesting)
As a KDE user, I would prefer that to be true. Experience has shown me otherwise.
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: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]