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Dealing with the Unix Copy and Paste Paradigm?
MolecularBear asks: "I grew up on Windows machines, using the ol' ctrl-c to copy and ctrl-v to paste. For the past few years I've been a hardcore Linux user, running it almost exclusively at home and at work. As I am sure you are all aware, highlighting text in Linux automatically performs a copy while the middle mouse button performs a paste. The Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v standard works in many applications, but not all. Lately I have begun to find the automatic highlight-copy to be annoying. As in, I'll highlight text to copy it, then realize I want to highlight a block of text for the purpose of deleting it. Of course, the second highlighting overwrites the first highlighting. I am curious about how other people accomplish their copy/paste needs. Any special setups, applications, or words of wisdom?"
..but I don't have a solution either :)
;)
What annoys me the most is when copying/pasteing URL's. I'll highlight© a url somewhere then I go and paste it into firefox. Out of habbit I'll go and highlight the current URL and control+v what I assume I'm pasteing... and end up with the same URL that I started with.
Whats more interesting is that sometimes what control+v pastes is different from what the middle-click pastes. I'm sure there is a reason, and I'm also sure its my fault for not knowing it... but its still annoying..
What I've come to do is to copy a link via control+c or highlighting then opening a new tab in firefox. I have firefox to open new tabs to blank URL's and then I just middle click or control+v the URL.
Its a partial and flawed solution to a small part of your problem. Of course, this is Slashdot
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
I usually find you can just pick up the url by selecting it, then middle button drop it into the browser. That seems to work on konq, netscape, mozilla and firefox on both linux and solaris.
:)
But i do feel your pain
Firefox and Konqueror should have a button for "Open the clipboard in a new tab".
...is the lack of a standard toolkit. Keep an eye on X.org. I only really work in terminal appart from web browsing. When I copy a url from a term I have to remember to have left the URL bar in firefox bare. Otherwise I end up selecting it to delete the text in there.... you see whats happening anyway :)
Just a small shortcut - Ctrl-K will (should!) erase the rest of the line, no need for highlighting it. Works wonders for clearing the URL bar :-).
highlighting text in Linux automatically performs a copy while the middle mouse button performs a paste
I wish. That's the behavior that I prefer. In the past half-year, I've tried about four different distributions, and none of them have had that as the default behavior. It seems like they're intentionally trying to become like Windows.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
yeay.
it's called, "paste in emacs first if neccessary"
it's a pretty advanced system, seems to work on most distros i've worked with out of the box.
I'm sorry, i think this article is fluff as far as "ask slashdot" goes. yesterdays girl vs. gaming discussion was more interesting.
~dijjnn
I personally hope that there is a copy/paste that works among ALL applications and that there is no X11-kind of copy. While handy, it is also the source of problems and very bad usability-wise.
Which is embarrassing sometimes, depending on the contents of the aforementioned clipboard.
TheHustler
http://www.elmarko.org/ - Useless bilge
http://www.asylum-games.co.uk/ - Co-Founder
Whew, glad to see I'm not the only one .. the whole "click middle button to
/boot/kernel-2.4.25 to the printer.
paste" thing drives me NUTS.
I started computer life as a Mac user. I think one button is the simplest and
most elegant way to design a mouse. I think mod-C and mod-V is the easiest way
to cut & paste (one hand on keyboard, one on mouse). I also have big hands and
fumbling fingers. I very often paste garbage into Mutt or other programs (for
instance, extremely critical SSH sessions to production machines) in my
Konsole windows. Hold breath, wait 2 seconds for the beeping to stop, paste
text into another window and try to figure out if I just emailed porn to the
client or sent
I even whipped out the soldering iron and replaced the Omron tactile switches
in my trackball with the stiffest they had a digikey. It did help a little.
And I also have dealt with the slight confusion that results after I highlight
something, whip over to another window, and realize that I have to select
everything to delete it first, which trashes the selection. Thankfully,
Control-C/V works in the programs that I usually do this with.
I bet most people don't even realize that X11 actually has more than one
"clipboard". Did you? There is nothing in the interface that suggests I should
have a mental model of multiple selection areas. Only after learning about
Vim's keystrokes for accessing the various buffers did I realize what was
going on.
I just wish I could permanently and completely switch off this "feature" of
X11, in all programs. I'm not stupid, I've been using X11 nearly daily since
1990, and I've been screwing it up since then. Apparently just bringing this
up in public is enough to condemn a person to flames, but there it is.
Dear X11: please join the rest of the world and shed at least one of those
buttons. Get rid of multiple clipboards or whatever you call them. I don't
need it. My grandmother doesn't need it. Maybe some geeks have trained
themselves to need it, let them figure out how to turn it back on.
And while we're on the subject can we please standardize Control-C vs. ALT-C,
etc.???
(And yes I wrote this in a terminal and selected/pasted it with the button.. because Control-C doesn't work in the terminal!)
Lately I have begun to find the automatic highlight-copy to be annoying. As in, I'll highlight text to copy it, then realize I want to highlight a block of text for the purpose of deleting it. Of course, the second highlighting overwrites the first highlighting. I am curious about how other people accomplish their copy/paste needs.
I used to run into the same problem, but you already know the solution: use ctrl-c and ctrl-v. If an application doesn't support them, scrap it. Just ignore your middle mouse button -- pretend it isn't there -- and you won't have this problem.
Copy and paste using highlight and middle-click works in every X application, but nowadays other methods are usually available. If you use a desktop environment such as KDE or Gnome, everything should be sorted for you, thanks to their desktop environment capabilities. Just switch to a fully-fledged desktop environment.
"... performs a copy while the middle mouse button performs a paste."
I use a Mac you insensitive clod!
I believe using Emacs will solve this problem.
Keep the faith, share the code
avoid. mouse. usage.
cue drool-and-twitch replies...
I keep hitting control-B to get previous commands, control-H to get to the beginning of the line, control-A to insert, control-E to get to the end of the line.
You think YOU have problems?!?! Think about poor poor pitiful me and my basement full of VAXen next time.
For something like a URL bar, most browsers I'm aware of will let you hit Alt-A to go to the start of the line and then Alt-K to delete the current URL, without destroying the current selection.
Any app more complex than that really should be providing their own copy/paste functionality. The automatic-copy-on-highlight only uses *one* of the X selection buffers...
This is the way it's always been & this is the way most UNIX+X users prefer it: highlight=copy, middle-click=paste.
Adapt.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Soon Slashdot will be filled with the waring camps of "X is perfection" and "X is old, so it is bad."
In this case, I find that it's merely a matter of getting used to the way the X clipboard functions. For example, delete the old text AFTER you paste the new text. It's a different way of managing your clipboard, but it's not necessary any better; for most jobs, I find it to be MORE convenient, and I start to forget to Ctrl-C when I'm in Windows.
For more information on how X handles the clipboard/selection, see Jamie Zawinski's informative web page.
The copy-paste inconsistencies are collateral damage from having various window managers to choose from. Gnome (which was originally intended as a sort of COM-for-Linux) was supposed to simplify and standardize object transfers through copy/paste, but A) it doesn't do it quite consistently with itself and B) it never caught on outside of Gnome projects.
GNUStep has a pretty good clipboard, and I hear KDE does too... one of the biggest problems is setting a standard set of keys that apps won't listen for so the window manager can use it to copy & paste (unless you just do a clipboard widget like GNUStep).
And what do you do for apps that have their own clipboard/kill ring? Do you make the top of the emacs kill ring equal the clipboard? And what happens if you have a clipboard that handles objects and not just text and the app being pasted to has no handler for that object type?
All's true that is mistrusted
Delete first, then copy and paste?
The best thing you can do is to complain to the developers at X.org, GNOME, and KDE (and whatever other desktop systems you know of). They need to hear this stuff, from many quarters, before they'll actually do anything about it. I think that X.org is probably the best place to start, given that development-oriented nature of the fork.
As a slight correction, the copy-paste problem you describe isn't a Linux issue; it's an X Window System issue.
It's always been broken.
And any mention of a possible solution brings down the wrath of nerds who want to keep unix as unintuitive and awkward as possible.
Besides the nuisance of what mouse click or keystroke you use to move text, it's not a clipboard like Windows uses, merely a text buffer.
Ie; it's only good for text. You cant copy/paste (and by extension drag and drop) files, bitmaps, etc uniformly between apps.
It's just another item in a laundry list of issues that are major to end users, but a low priority for hackers. Another speedbump on the road to Linux (unix) as a truly competitive desktop platform.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
That would work great, if it weren't for subconcious actions. I am one of those weird people who highlight things they are reading almost compulsively -- not as I read along, but sentence at a time. It is really frustrating to copy something, do some reading, and suddenly find you're pasting 3 lines of text into your browser's address bar.
--Kevin
Actually, come to think of it...I have no idea what paradigm means.
Or else, first paste what you want to insert, then delete what you want to remove...
This is yet another reason why we need a replacement for XFree86 that is well thought out. I'm sure the original developers were like "Gee, why use Ctrl-C at all!" but as the author of this story mentions, how do you paste over other text? XFree86 needs to be booted. Instead of searching for a replacement, someone really needs to thik about all the problems and limitations XFree86 imposes on us and come up with an alternative that frees us from all this baggage.
Will Stokes Album Shaper http://albumshaper.sf.net
When I'm on Windows I use Trillian which does this and i have a habit of highlighting as i read ... and sense i frequently copy links to send ... I am always pasting into Trillian ... unfortunately this has caused some problems with my gf when i highlight something that she doesn't need to see ....
On my Gentoo box running KDE 3.2.0, there's a Klipper program which acts as a clipboard for the copy buffers. Somehow I think that program is able to distinguish the two different methods of copying, and whenever I do a C-c, then select some text and C-v, it will paste the text I copied with C-c, and if I middle-click with the mouse, it will paste the text I just selected.
Personally I think that's a nice way to do it, since I have two ways to copy things, and having two pseudo buffers is quite nice. Naturally, if things do get confusing, I can always click on the Klipper icon in the system tray and select the text I wanted to paste.
Also, if the left click select/middle click paste must be relied upon, just select and delete the text first, then select the text that needs to be copied. It's only a matter of reversing the workflow compared to the 'normal' Windows way.
Please direct all bug reports to
Having used UN*X systems almost exclusively for 6 years, I have come to find Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v (or Cmd-c, Cmd-v on Macs) annoying.
But I do know what you're talking about. I mostly run into this issue when entering text into the address bar of Mozilla. Fortunately, Mozilla uses emacs-style keybindings, so if I want to replace what's in the address bar with what's on the clipboard, I just:
1. Focus on the address bar.
2. Hit Ctrl-a to go to the beginning of the line.
3. Hit Ctrl-k to kill the contents of the address bar.
4. Click on the address bar with the middle mouse button to paste the new contents.
I, personally, would like the best of both worlds, but that would essentially require that the system read my mind. Obviously, we're not there yet.
.. that the primary selection is overwritten on highlight, try using the clipboard instead. :)
I never used Ctrl+C/V anyway, even when I still used Windows. I used Ctrl+Ins/Shift+Ins instead, they work pretty well.
When I switched to linux I was used to Windows-style copy/pasting too, but in a very few monthes I were used to the middle-click thing.
:\) I have trouble copy/paste ;)
;)
Now, when I'm using a windows PC (ie at university
Back when I switched, I had the same troubles as you : I wanted to select to delete, but then it would go into my paste buffer and erase the previous one. It was especially the case for my web browser and its address bar.
My solution is to click only once then use the emacs bindings (e.g C-E C-U) to delete the string.
Some apps (e.g Eclipse) don't even allow the typical X copy/paste system to remain compatible with "windows-like" pasting.
It seems hard that we'll have an unified way to copy/paste on major OSes since we are used to the middle click pasting
So what is the problem? Are the apps you use broken?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
10 Highlight text you want to delete
20 Press Del
30 Highlight text you want to copy
40 Move cursor to copy position
50 Press middle mouse button
60 PRINT 'Happy Camper'
The select-and-middle-click is not really copy-paste but more like drag-and-drop, just without the actual dragging.
Read this and see why.
The only times you will encounter problems is when you are running legacy (pre gtk2/qt3 applications), which in modern distrutions are going quite quickly.
Copying and pasting text just works for me in Linux for years now, I am bewildered why this subject actually came up again!
What most linux aficionados don't realize is that vi and emacs are the best anti-linux vaccines. The moment you tell a non-technical person that he or she would have to use from now on the usability nightmares that vi and emacs are, you can't be sure that they not only will they run away from linux, but they'd also tell everybody to do the same.
KDE does ctrl-c/ctrl-v in most of its apps, if jedit is too heavy for you, try kate for a change.
Open source project very rarely have the money to do real usability apps, so I think it'd be a good idea to adopt UI elements from existing commercial designs
The Raven
I find the highlighting of text used in Linux (or X-windows) rather hard... it tends to include too much text or not enough, and when I then click elsewhere and move the mouse just a tiny bit as I click, I highlight another letter and I lose the text I intended to copy. From a usability standpoint, the X-Windows method is horrible. My poor mom never got to grips with it (and she's gotten used to some pretty weird OS'es in the past).
Another thing that Linux needs is a proper clipboard like Windows has. Copy anything you like: pictures, files, texts, documents. Then paste it into any application that will accept the data type. I do my day-to-day work in MS Windows, and this is one feature that I use very often, without having to think about it. Is there anything similar for Linux in the making?
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
then select and paste
nt
A helpful discussion of the X clipboard behavior on freedesktop:
Clipboard Standards.
Is when you have to telnet from Linux to Solaris boxes and the keys are all fucked up. If you have enough Solaris and Linux boxes in your network, you'll go crazy having to use CTRL-H on some and backspace on others.
You sound like the timecube guy :)
For URLs, Clipper has event handlers, So you can configure Klipper to automatically open the Copied URL, So no need to visit the browser window and paste. Merely highlight the URL, it will go automatically in KDE Clipboard, and Klipper will open it in a URL.
Also other option is if using either Mozilla/FireXXX or Konqueror, open a New TAB , this will give u a blank address bar , So you are free to paste your copied URL.
For Mozilla/FireXXX, there is an extension , I think called diggler, which provides a button to clear the contents of the Address Bar, So just click the diggler button before you paste.
Similarly in Mozilla/FireXXX , if you are copying Text URLs , i.e. something like http://www.slashdot.org , then you can install an extension called "Text links", which will give you a Right click Menu to Open the Highlighted Text link in a new tab or a new Window, without having to paste it in the address bar. I agree that all this is related only to Web Browsing, but that's when I used most cut-copy pasting , when I am browsing multiple Sites.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Here's a way to make the behavior optional...But I don't know that it's ever been implemented:
Make copies go into one buffer, and pastes come from another. When a Ctrl-C is detected, via XInput or whatever, copy the "copy" buffer into the "paste" buffer.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
A simple, high-level, question: why can't the Window Manager (Gnome, KDE, etc.) be made to handle both schemes, and allow the user to switch between them, but not let both scheme be active at once? This would of couse require support in the applications running under the WM's, but I would figure such a change in inevitable if the Linux desktop is to become more mainstream.
Ctrl-A and Ctrl-K, of course. I've got too much Alt on the brain at the office...
The fact that copy/paste is buggy or sluggish under X-Windows has a simple reason: There are tons of SDKs for X-Windows, almost all of them using a separate clipboard implementation/mechanism.
Saying that you deal with a technical problem by getting used to it, is saying that technology will fail to address the problem. As you say, "Linux is different" (almost true, since it has almost nothing to do with Linux, but rather with X-Windows). I would rather say:
X-Windows clipboard management sucks. If you want to use Linux on the desktop, you'll have to get used to it.
The lack of a decent standard allow everyone to do everything. And they do. And we are left with a huge app base for X, with very high UI fragmentation. Hence, what you learn to do with one app is different with another one.
Annoying, but that's the way X is.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Due to wrist problems in my right hand (we won't go in to details why I have wrist problems), I try not to use the mouse as much for highlighting. Holding down SHIFT and using the arrow keys, HOME and END I find is much faster than the mouse.
The problem is X leaves copy/paste (and pretty much everything else) up to the application, and every application does it differently. Ideally one day we will all settle on a widget toolkit that enforces a standard copy/paste behavior. I'm not holding my breath though.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
... and run Windows! *ducks*
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Linux automatically performs a copy while the middle mouse button performs a paste.
This has nothing to do with your machine running GNU/Linux it is the X selection mechanism and its use for copying text. You'd have the same issues on any machine running diverse free software X based applications. There is no good answer for you. It is one of the weaknesses of a federated system.
an ill wind that blows no good
Isn't that what Darwin would have said ? ;-)
In this case, hard to say what's evolution or not...
The url in firefox is empty in new tabs, so here's what I do:
1. drag over the url
2. hit ctrl+t (creates new tab)
3. middle-click to paste url into browser
4. hit enter
My technique for doing this is to highlight the URL I wish to copy, left click in the browser's URL window, control+u to erase the pre-existing URL, then middle-click to copy in the highlighted URL.
Very quick, and makes sense if you're used to using *nix terminals.
...original Command-C, Command V, Command Z.
Everything else is just a pale imitation/ripoff.
There is a de-facto standard for this - basically, Ctrl-X/C/V should use one selection "CLIPBOARD" and the highlight selection should be a completely independent "bonus", "PRIMARY". Then, if anything cut/copy/paste works _better_ than windows - the "normal" clipboard behaviour that windows/mac/amiga/everyone-else is used to, _plus_ the "bonus" of fast middle-button-paste for the simple stuff.
Problem solved - except for applications that wilfully break the conventions or were written before the conventions were established and not updated. Oh well. APPLICATION AUTHORS - PLEASE READ AND UNDERSTAND THE CLIPBOARD SPEC ON FREEDESKTOP.ORG.
Copy and paste using highlight and middle-click works in every X application
Hmmm. Not true. Just not true. There are plenty of clipboards on X-Windows, only the apps that use "PRIMARY" act that way, not the other. Java apps for example use the clipboard "CLIPBOARD", and middle click does nothing. There are plenty of other apps that works that way, I am just too lazy to look them up.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Then don't do that.
The middle button does a "paste current selection", which is not exactly equivalent to any of the other cut / copy / paste functions you find on Windows or Linux. I noticed that OSX has this function available in some apps as shift-command-V.
You can completely ignore it if you do not like it awnd stick to control x / c / v, or you can choose to use it.
Either way, it should not interfere with the normal cut / copy / paste operations that are available.
If you cannot keep that strait in your mind, then ignore the functionality and do it the way Windows does it.
I have found as much consistency on Linux for cut / copy / paste between applications as I ever found on Windows, when I used it -- both are far from perfect.
When I create html pages using Bluefish for my internal web server; constantly cutting and pasting can be a very real nightmare. However EVERYTHING that you ctrl+c or ctrl+x shows up in Klipper (5-10 of last copied/cut items). It gets some time to get use to (always clicking on Klipper to have access to cut and copied info) but once you get the hang of it, you will find things get a whole lot easier :)
Obviously you don't use linux if you have a girlfriend.
KDE does a great job with cntl-c and cntl-v. Every Application seems to copy and paste with those shorcuts when you use KDE.
KDE, however, isnt my thing. So I usally just have to stick with the mouse buttons.
yyp
Every time I select something and then middle click to paste it in a Windows application nothing happens. Unless I am trying to paste a URL in to a browser window, then I get some annoying cursor that moves the current page up and down instead of sending the browser the URL I want to view.
Don't even get me started on the brokenness of the title bar and window decorations. Sheesh!
it works fuckin' great for me!
The more you use it, the more you use it.
Out of the box, it might not do much of anything you want, but few problems you can envision haven't been solved.
Only thing I haven't seen yet is a PalmOS version, so I can run it on my Kyocera7135. Got one of those external keyboards; but, hey, that's motivation to figure out how to configure a GCC cross-compiler and add something to the emacs canon.
Other than PalmOS, emacs is OS and window-manager (if any) agnostic, and comes with a ridiculous menu of existing tools.
Go, emacs.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
It's a shame because accidentally touching the middle button over a terminal window can be a F*-ing disaster.
I think it is a lazy mouse-oriented method of copying and pasting. Sadly, Windows can get by with the keyboard better than most X environments.
I am starting to pick up on clicking the end of the URL, ^U and then middle click. Or, click the middle of the URL, and ^K to kill the rest of the line.
At home (on Windows) I use the True X-Mouse Gizmo which makes Windows mouse more X-like(select = copy, middle = paste, raise/lower window). One thing nice about it is if you explicitly hit ^C (as opposed to select copy) it knows to not copy the next time you select some text. You can also middle-click while dragging to turn on/off copy.
This is kind of confusing at the beginning, but it sure beats all the accidental copying I've done.To iterate is human; to recurse, divine!
Copying to selection only activates on 'mouseup' so if you need to delete text simply hold the mouse button down and hit delete on the keyboard then let the button up and middle click to paste the original clipboard text.
Of course if it's too much effort to use the mouse and keyboard at the same time then just use whatever your window manager offers for a clipboard
if you think thats bad try going from getting used to that back to windows, i still middle select and expect to have it paste :p
Unfortunately, if you've gotten used to the Windowsesque control-C and control-V, you're stuck with the worst of both worlds. If you want the cut/paste mechanism to be consistent across all apps (and who doesn't?), it can't be control-C/control-V, because you've got to be able to use those verbatim in terminal emulation windows. That's why I vastly prefer the Mac command-C and command-V (from which, of course, the Windows hotkeys were copied, albeit in the customarily mildly broken Windoze fashion).
The current consensus on freedesktop.org is something along the lines of:
The problem is that some apps use only the primary selection for all copy/paste operations, so it can get confusing.
For more info, look here
The XFCE window manager has a nice clipboard management utility that sits in the Dock. Clicking on it displays the last 8 or so things that you copied/cut. Selecting one "arms" it so that you can paste that item.
The X clipboard work exactly like the Windows and Mac ones. When you chose 'copy' on an edit menu or similar (ctrl+c in a lot of toolkits) the application will claim ownership of the clipboard and copy the text to some internal buffer. When an application gets a paste in some way (edit->paste or ctrl+v perhaps) it will request the text from the clipboard owner.
There is ALSO the selection mechanism. Whenever you select text in an application it will claim ownership of the primary selection, whenever an application receives a middle mouse click it will request the primary selection from the registered application.
These two mechanisms are orhogonal and should in no way interfere with each other in a correctly written application. Hope this clears things up. See JWZ's small guide to the topic for more information.
go backwards...
1. remove old url
2. highlight new url
3. middle click it into browser
ta-da
Middle mouse button? BAH!
Any hardcore Linux user knows you use "yy" and "p" to copy and paste!
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
In every program I use in Linux (specifically, Mozilla, rdesktop, and various GNOME stuff) Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V work perfectly, and so does the select/middleclick system, and neither interferes with each other.
I haven't used KDE in a long time but I understand that they introduced the same behavior with Qt3/KDE3.
Unless you're using really ancient software, pretty much everything will work in *either* mode, or you can do what I do and use a combination of both (choosing whether to bother pressing Ctrl-C to copy depending on whether you're going to need to highlight something at the destination).
I'm really curious to understand how so many people manage to still have a problem with this. Are you perhaps expecting that since "everybody knows that select copies on Linux", Ctrl-V will paste the thing that you last selected, instead of the last thing you Ctrl-C'd, and not testing it to verify this? Or just assuming that selecting something will overwrite your Ctrl-C buffer? I'd like to believe that people would actually test these things before posting Ask Slashdots about it, but you have to wonder...
wmcliphist is a windowmaker dockapp that stores the last several X cuts. Doesn't solve the problem entirely, but it does make it easy to recover the last selection. Works well enough that I don't notice anymore.
Lurk.
Klipper is a pretty handy tool from the fine people at KDE. Like most open source products, the configuration options are fairly extensive, but you can access a history of clipboard items (ctrl-alt-v) , do regex matching, set up actions, etc....
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to eat and he will fish forever.
As a slight correction, the copy-paste problem you describe isn't a Linux issue; it's an X Window System issue.
Correction to your correction:
Seeing is that the only time I use X Windows is when I'm in Linux, it is a problem in your golden boy OS, Linux.
This reminds me of the mentality I saw with the linux-based media player thread.
If you are still using Xterm, then what is wrong with you? Get a modern terminal emulator such as Gnome Terimanl and get used to the easy Shift-Control-V (The shift is there to avoid conflicts with teriminal programs). Enjoy.
... is that there is no uniform method of copy-paste.
Emacs, which I've been using extensively lately for coding, has highlight-to-copy and ctrl-Y to paste.
Pine has ctrl-k and ctrl-u for cut and paste lines--no highlighting, since I access it through telnet.
I use Linux Opera as my web browser, and it uses the Windows ctrl-C/ctrl-V highlight-to-select method. Makes sense, since it appears to be an almost exact port.
gaim's cut-and-paste behavior is weird--I can't get some things to copy, especially those that include smilies.
In konsole windows you have to use the right-click menu.
And, the system seems to sit on various C&P buffers--for instance, I can cut and paste things within emacs, but I can't get anything in or out of emacs. (Yes, I understand that emacs predates kde and such and thus has its own buffers, but can't the folks at the FSF fix this?)
I don't really care what system gets used; ideally, like everything else in linux, it will be configurable. It's slightly annoying, however, to have to use different methods all the time. I don't mind it that much, but casual computer users (ex: my 52-year-old mother, who has the most amazing talent for breaking kmail) get confused--"why isn't it pasting?"
1) I highlight a URL in some text.
2) I highlight the URL selector in Mozilla - this causes the previous highlighted text to lose focus and causes it to go to clipboard.
3) I middle-click the URL in Mozilla (which never lost focus) and the clipboard text goes in.
Not sure how "focus" actually works in this case, but you should be able to understand what needs to change to make it work. And for goodness sake have the FSF patent this so only Free Software will be able to use it. As the "inventor" can't I still patent for a short time after this public posting?
No offense, but this arrogance is exactly why Linux has insignificant desktop market share. Until the Linux community can get off its high horse ("This is the correct behavior??" Who says?), it will fail to attract users.
Specifically, it will fail the "my mother" test: Why would my mother want to use this? As a disclaimer, let me point out that my mother has postgraduate education, has started a successful business, is a successful archaeologist, etc. We're not talking about a country bumpkin here. But she doesn't much like, or understand, computers. It took her long enough to figure out Ctrl-c Ctrl-v; she doesn't want to learn another behavior.
The fact is that if Linux wants people to "adapt", then it needs to offer *evident* benefits beyond what Windows offers (again, subject to the my mother test; she doesn't care to recompile anything at all, ever). I might see enough benefit to tolerate some annoyance (I've never really noticed this as a big one, though I'll now be sure to count the times that I errantly cut/paste things), but she doesn't.
-db
it doesn't work in Windows.
One thing I do when having to cut and paste a lot is to open a terminal and type in... /root# cat >/dev/null ... or a real file name.
Then cut and paste and ctl-d when you are done.
It does not solve all problems but it is useful.
http://tinyurl.com/globalwarmingisascam
When I first started using XFree86, this issue bit me a few times. Now that I am used to it I want nothing else (it feels much more efficient), and resend that my mac doesn't work that way. Really, it takes some getting used to, but it really is the better way.
Here are some hints:
- Delete the text you want to replace *before* selecting the text you want to copy.
- If you forgot to do so, paste first, then select and delete. Or use the keyboard: Ctl+k to delete to the end of the line, Ctl+u to delete to the beginning of the line. In some apps, either of these deletes the whole line.
- Selecting using the keyboard (shift+arrow) usually goes to a different clipboard.
- Use an application that lets you have multiple buffers. I believe KDE and GNOME have these, and I am sure there are stand alone programs for X11 that do this.
If you really cannot get used to the X11 way of copy paste, stick to using apps in which ^C and ^V work, and pray that, someday, there will be a universal supported interface that can be configured to work either way.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I think you mean this one. Oh wait.. You were talking about Linux and not games.. my fault :)
Hmmm.
Someone needs to make a bomb Linux API so everything just works.
There are tons of SDKs for X-Windows, almost all of them using a separate clipboard implementation/mechanism.
2. The above is completely false. X has a primary and secondary copy/paste buffer. It always works the same way, the only real caveat being that apps can use different key combos to control the primary buffer. I haven't used an app in years that used anything other than control+c/v for the primary buffer.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
An ancient program to manage the X cutbuffs. Just switch to a different buffer. I think you can have up to 8 with xcb. Adds a click to select the cutbuff, but having 8 clipboards is nice. :)
I do most of my work in Emacs, which has unlimited undo and effectively unlimited copy/paste buffers. You can even run a shell inside Emacs (M-x shell), then cut/copy/paste/edit/delete all you want.
Use Control + Shift + C and Control + Shift + V for copy and pasting.
Copy should be control-alt-caps-lock-tilde. Paste should be escape-escape-shift-F6 and click the first and fourth mouse buttons. This pastes in two copies, which is what I usually want. If, for some reason, I only want one copy, then after I pasteI just press PgDn on the numeric keypad with NumLock on, then hit SysRq twice in rapid succession (usually, within half a second). This conveniently deletes the second copy.
If your mouse has less than four buttons, it's broken. Get one with four buttons.
Simple. Clean. Logical. Convenient.
I like it this way so this is the right way.. I know what I like, and that makes me a UI expert.
If anyone wants it any other way, well, let them set it as a non-default user preference. And if the preference isn't honored by every application, well, tough.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Telling someone that they are clueless beacuse they use a differnt setup than you is not very helpful.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
I grew up using X-Windows on Unix systems, and I have always found the cut'n'paste dance to be quite clumsy. First you mouse something, then you go to a menu (or the keyboard), then you mouse again. Slow and time consuming.
I resent the one-size-fits-all mentality engendered by the MS monopoly. This sort of thing should be a user choice.
Maybe I should give Linux a second try...it might make more sense this time...
Just use VIM. Then you have another buffer.
If you plan ahead in perfect detail, this wouldn't be a problem. To replace some text with something else, you delete the old, copy the new, paste the new, not the (more logical) copy the new, select the old, replace it with paste.
A lot of the odd little angularities of Linux make more sense when you realize it was designed for people that think and plan in minute detail, all the time. Creating software the traditional unix way is like that: I've never been willing to remember (let alone type, every time I want to edit) the names of every one of my source files, when modern IDE's are designed to do it for me, better, faster, & cheaper (if my time is worth anything.) Linux was designed by people who don't feel that way.
This may be a great O/S project!
Does anyone know of any middle click utilities for Windows? I've gotten so used to using Klipper in KDE for keeping Copy & Paste content handy, and the middle mouse button for quick and dirty Copy & Paste, that I find myself cussing at Windows for not letting me use the middle mouse button that way.
I didnt see anyone mention the whole Ctrl Insert, Shift Insert option.
Works on some linux apps and desktops, still works in windows.
I have my putty setup as an X window, middle mouse click, right mouse extends, middle pastes.
What pisses me off is command shell for windows, I just start up sshd under cygwin and use putty to ssh into my own windows box. Much better...
http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/clipboards-sp ec
c /c lipboards.txt
http://freedesktop.org/Standards/clipboards-spe
Sure, i could make them nice html links, but considering the topic of discussion, making people cut and paste them to use seem most appropriate.
It just struck me how amazing it is that a Windows user is complaining about the lack of interface consistency in Linux.
Only a few years ago Windows advocates denigrated interface consistency as a feature for the small-minded. Applications needed different key combinations for common actions because ever app was different, and anyway enforcing a standard was a totalitarian thing to do. Choice, choice, choice.
Before that, of course, DOS users mocked GUIs, mice, large memory spaces, etc.
It's unbellievable how time really does change how people look at things.
Ho-hum ... your 'mother test' is actually the 'Windows user test'. X copy/paste predates Windows copy/paste. And it's more flexible (this being currently the problem). This is the correct behavior for X, not for Windows.
If the 'typical mother' had started with a DEC instead of Win3.x/Win9x, middle click paste would have been the 'correct and expected behavior'.
On my UNIX machine, Command-C copies, Command-V pastes, Command-X cuts, and Command-Shift-U opens a highlighted URL in the web browser.
Oh, and Control-C breaks out of command line programs, like it should.
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
i've been using Linux as my only OS for nearly 8 years now. the highlight-as-copy method is engrained in my head. in fact whenever i work on my friends windows machines (free tech support ARGH) it always trips me up to have to use ctrl-c and ctrl-v. i personally think the Linux method of copy/paste is so much better than the windows method. sure it doesn't traverse every application but when it does it's so quick an simple. i would rather see all Linux applications pick up the highlight/paste method instead of moving over to the the keyboard method.
nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
The X clipboard is not broken, you just don't understand it. There are several posts explaining it already posted, two being my own, so I won't repeat it in its entirety. The short version is that middle+click and meta/control+c/v are two separate buffers, and people get confused by that. If someone didn't know anything about X, they would most likely never notice the middle+click buffer, sticking to control+c/v which nearly all new apps use as the default key bindings for copy/paste.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Well 'booting' XFree86 would be a bit too drastic to get what we want from it. XFree86 is wicked fast and quite extensible, but it does have a lot of cruft in it, and it seems as if the authors are now bending over backwards to not break previous implemtations. I think a better solution would be to fork XFree86, integrate a boatload of the extensions that have evolved over the years, standardize and modernize the font management, build in alpha-blending stuff, add a 'toolkit layer' so Qt and GTK could be reimplemented as 'plugins', etc.
The new release would break backward compatibility, but I'm of the mind that at some point it's needed to move forward. We wouldn't have to break compatibility again for a long time if it was done right.
Overall though, there's so much good driver code and input stuff in XFree that building a new system from scratch would never happen. Fresco and friends have been making snail-progress for years on this, and it's not for lack of interest, it's for lack of need.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
what i really hate is that what i'll refer to as a "clipboard buffer" -- a chunk of memory that holds whatever you copied -- seems to be application dependent. IE, closing an application clears the clipboard buffer. very annoying when i copy something in, say, a web browser, close the browser, and try and copy it to a GAIM window.
filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
Use applications that support copy/paste correctly, and file wishlist bugs against applications that don't.
X (or actually: the standards lying on top of it, such as the ICCCM and Freedesktop.org's specs), supports two concurrent copy/paste clipboards; One for select-middle-click-paste, and one for classical copy/paste using explicit actions.
This way, you can select text A, ctrl-C it, select text B, and ctrl-V-paste text A over text B, just like you're used to. Additionally, you can do a quick copy/paste by just selecting text and middle-click-pasting it (this is more of a shortcut, and can for example be ignored by non-computer-literate users).
Unfortunately, although X supports this fine, the UI widgetsets, as usual, have been lacking proper support for this. Recently, this has much improved, and at least GTK 2 and QT 3 support this correctly. What we need to do now is fixing all widgetsets and/or applications that don't do this properly.
See this paper from Freedesktop.org for a more detailed explanation.
As a KDE user, I have the joy of using Klipper. I imagine other window managers might also have clipboard managers as well. Give it a shot. I find it quite useful.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
been using it as my main browser for over a year and never noticed that :)
"...highlighting text in Linux automatically performs a copy..."
There's your problem. Selection in X (not Linux) is selection, not copying. If you want to copy, then tell it to copy.
X has a select buffer. It also has a clipboard. What you are used to is a three step process of selection, copying to a clipboard, and then pasting. You can do that in X. You can also paste the selection buffer directly, which some find confusing.
Use a program such as xclipboard to get the behavior that you are looking for - select, copy, paste. Select & paste is not the only choice.
If you copy a link (Unix-style, by highlighting) and then paste it into the body of the browser window, (i.e. where the web page is actually displayed) by middle-clicking, Mozilla will actually go to the site as if you'd typed the URL into the location bar. This has worked for as long as I can remember, and I've been using Netscape since 1.1.
That way you don't have to remember to delete the URL in the location bar before highlighting the URL you want to paste.
It's actually kind of annoying if you use middle-click to open a link in a new tab, and you miss, AND you happen to have a URL in your copy buffer. But otherwise, very handy.
Is supposed to be the original Windows copy/cut/paste buttons:
Copy: Ctrl-Insert
Paste: Shift-Insert
(I can't remember what Cut is, I never use it.. probably ctrl-delete)
Then, sometime in the Win95 or Win98 era, Microsoft changed it to the less-intuitive and less-standard Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.
And Microsoft was a member of the body of people/organizations that made Ctrl-Insert and Shift-Insert the standard.. then went and trashed it...
This is the CUA92 user interface universal standard, by the way.. and i'm a bit busy right now to do a google search for it, but I'm sure anyone interested could find it..
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
install windows :)
OR pay a team in india to fix it for you.
shouldn't fetch more than 10k?
-judging another only defines yourself
And the sooner you Linux zealots realize this, the sooner Windows users will stop looking at me cross eyed asking why X handles copy/paste in the most retarded manner possible.
KDE's klipper is a step in the right direction - but it needs to be a X extension, free of whatever DE you use.
A unified toolkit with full copy/paste/whatever support (a la windows) that all WM's/DE's could use would be a massive improvement.
For those who can't get over the past and get with the program, leave it as an option "X_retarded_copy_paste".
The galeon 1.2 series (don't know if it's in the newer ones) has a nice hack to get around this: A location bar erase button. Highlight your URL, click the erase button, paste it.
It doesn't deal with the underlying problem, but it's a very handy workaround.
Are we sure Roblimo didn't write this article?
I hate sigs.
However when you close an app which was Ctrl-C'd it STILL loses it in GNOME, major pain in the arse, when is the clipboard daemon coming along?
Freedesktop.org compliant systems (such as Gnome, KDE and friends) consistently use the primary selection for pasting the selection, and the clipboard for explicit copypasting. Then you can use the one which is more handy for the task at hand.
Of course, some legacy applications don't respect this system, but mostly they can be traded in for more modern applications.
Other than simply getting used to the way unix handles it's clipboard, I've found that using programs compiled from similar libraries does away with this issue.
I use Gnome 2.6 currently, and using Ctrl-C Ctrl-V for copy and paste works in all of the applications I use. Although I do revert back to the double click, and a middle click a lot.
I can only assume that using KDE is similar as long as you stick with KDE or QT apps.
The problem is probably more prominent when using different applications that rely on different library sets. If you're using Gnome as your desktop, and Konq as your browser, ya, you might have an issue. If you use Gnome, and epiphany; you probably won't see this problem.
That's my two cents.
I want to copy and paste in windows with a highlight a middle click.... I can berely use windows now because I can't it is VERY annoying.
but I use all GNOME apps practically and have not have a ctrl-c ctrl-v problem in a while.
The copy buffer should operate like a fixed-length queue, or ring buffer. The newest copied selection goes at the front of the buffer, bumping the oldest entry off the end. I'd say 3 entries would be more than enough for most people.
When you hit ctrl-v, the most recent selection should be pasted. If this is not the selection you want, hitting ctrl-v again should cycle through the available selections.
By the way, this pasting behavior is exactly how Emacs operates. When you ctrl-w a selection, it goes into the kill buffer. Hitting ctrl-y recalls the selection. Hitting ctrl-u at that point will cycle through the kill buffer.
It would be real easy to combine the ease of use advantages of highlight to copy with the ability to highlight to delete or even copy multiple items.
Implement a copy buffer stack. Bind a simple key like escape to a function like swaping the top of the stack and the next element (you would want to have a minimum of two elements (possibly blank) in the stack at all times).
So you want to copy something highlight it. Now you don't want to have it deleted when you copy the next thing tap escape highlight your new text and if you want to replace this with the text in the buffer tap escape again to paste.
This sort of system preserves the ease of just highlighting to copy while giving it a great deal of additional power. Power users could of course bind additional functions like duplicate the top entry, delete an item etc.. etc.. If my description is a little confusing the model is from my hp48.
For all I know this has already been written, if so maybe someone can post a link.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Actually that's an Emacs control sequence.
Bash uses emacs control sequences by default, but can easily be set with either of 2 ways...
1. set environment variable EDITOR=vi
2. at prompt, type: set -o vi
then bash will act just like vi
no comment
Call this a troll if you must, but there is much to be appreciated from the monolithic leviathon.
OS behavior that is uniform throughout its (correctly written) applications is essential for end user ease of use and training. Period.
And why do some folks here try to deflect blame from the Linux operating system. (Its X's fault, Linux is as innocent and pure as the driven snow). Fine, then Linux peddlers need to create a true "Linux GUI" that functions uniformly accros applications.
These dumb mentalities of: "thats just the way it is" or "if you dont like it, you fix it" or "we can't change longtime stupid unix behaviors, the users must learn to workaround it" is exactly what keeps Linux from growing into a legitimate desktop OS.
I grew up using tab and shift-tab to indent/unindent selected blocks of code. Under most graphical text editors of unix/linux origin, all that happens is your block of code is deleted and replaced by a tab character. Each editor has its own key combos for block indent/unindent (like ctrl-shift-i/u), with little in common between them.
The middle mouse button always inserts the contents of the primary selection, while Edit->Paste always inserts the contents of the clipboard. The primary selection always contains whatever text currently highlighted. The clipboard contains whatever was hilighted when you last picked Edit->Cut or Edit->Copy. Hilighting text changes the primary selection, but does not change the clipboard.
See http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html for more information.
lameass
I use linux on my desktop at home, and MacOSX at work. At least once a day, while at work, I highlight a block of text, switch windows, middle-click, and.... nothing.
The traditional X copy/paste is excellent, and it saves a lot of movement compared to other methods. I'm not going to say it's better than ctrl-c / ctrl-v or anything, but I will say this: it works well.
So, in essence, I think your problem is really "how do I adjust my mind to working in different environments?" The answer: awareness and/or customization. And guess what? Of the three major OS's (Win/Mac/GNU)... only one cultivates awareness, and only one allows for *real* customization.
Yes, I'm a fanboy. And no, I'm not ashamed of that fact.
I call it the Arbitrary Multiplexing Triband Intraocular X-Clipboard Buffer It's a bit of hack using keylaunch and xclip paste following into ~/.keylaunchrc key=**.Z:echo `xclip -out` > /tmp/.clip1
key=.**Z:xclip -in /tmp/.clip1
key=**.X:echo `xclip -out` > /tmp/.clip2
key=.**X:xclip -in /tmp/.clip2
key=**.C:echo `xclip -out` > /tmp/.clip3
key=.**C:xclip -in /tmp/.clip3
key=..*Z:`xclip -out`
I expect everyones deep gratitude for this amazing piece of technology and keep in mind it is intended for non-commercial use only!
Hitler's in the fridge.
Somehow I thought this whole problem was gone long time ago. For me it just disappeared the moment I installed KDE 3.0. Maybe Debian packages somehow magically did the trick for me, I don't know. But since then only Konsole copies on selection, and it copies to its own internal buffer rather than the global KDE one, so it all just works.
If the only way to attract users is to have an OS that looks exactly like Windows and behaves exactly like Windows, then let them stay with Windows! I'd rather have it the way we have it today than have all unixes behave exactly like Windows..
I would not want an OS that passes MY mothers tests for the same reason I do not want to drive a car that passes a "my mother" test.
If now Windows happened to be (arguably) "first" and learned all users "the wrong way" to do copy-paste, that doesn't mean that X has to change it's behaviour, does it?
The users of X have figured out how to do copy-paste the X-way and probably don't want to learn another behaviour..
i have a habit of highlighting as i read
I'm glad I'm not the only one who does this. I also use drag-highlight modes to scroll text windows, you get much better control than a scroll wheel, or even than internet exploder's fancy scroll-wheel click and move the mouse around thing.
I find mozilla has a nasty bug where if you do too many selections in quick succession it hangs for about half a second. No idea what causes it...
In KDE 3.2.x (not sure about early versions) klipper gives you the option to control this feature a lot. You can have it completely sync the two clipboards at all times, you can turn off selection copying, you can keep them sperate...whatever floats your boat.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
There are two (well, three) buffers for clipboard-like functionality.
The first is maintained by the X server, this is the Ctrl+c/v that you expect in windows. The second is maintained by the application, which is the middle click behavior. These are orthogonal.
The problem is applications screw it up. The first way they could screw this up is to confuse these buffers, so ctrl+c clobbers your application buffer, or vice versa. More complicating is that GNOME preserves the highlight buffer it makes it persistent across closing apps - not really broken, but is unexpected (to me at least).
The other way to screw up is to not use a standard keyboard shortcut for copy and paste, forcing you to use the highlight-middle click tactic inappropriately. It's really only intended for quick fixes, usually within the application. I use it to copy to the URL bar from a webpage.
One could argue that it's X's problem for making it hard on developers, but at this point we're stuck. Trillian on Windows kills me by implementing the highlight and click on Windows, and NOT Copy/Paste.
Sun keyboards actually have a dedicated key for "copy", "cut", "paste", "undo" and a few others. This has always made the most sense to me.
This also works in the dual clipboard mode. So hitting the "copy" key will place the contents in a different clipboard then highlighting.
Works great.
This is why highlighting as you read is stupid. Break the habit now, before it breaks you.
So, basically, the clipboard would work OK for your mother. It's power users who try and combine both mechanisms at once then get confused who it doesn't work for, but there's no way around that.
The real problems with the X clipboard have more to do with handling large quantities of data, and standardised data formats than middle click vs ctrl-c/v.
Why the hell can't I map whatever keys or mouse buttons I want to cut and paste? Can I do this in X? I seem to remember being able to remap the keyboard but being limited on the mouse.
;)
On Windows, I have it set so that if I press both mouse buttons simultaneously, it copies, and clicking the mouse wheel pastes.. of course I'm using third-party mouse software.
I suppose under the covers it's really just doing a Ctrl-C or Ctrl-V, and that this only works because Windows is more standardized in that area. It sure would be nice if there were a separate key code for 'cut' and another for 'paste', so we don't have to rely on wacky combinations of the existing ones. One of you folks reading this, please come up with a new character set for me
And while you're at it, it would be cool to define a code to toggle a 'copy' mode, that captures keystrokes into the copy buffer, so I don't have to select and copy separately, after I've typed my text.
Read my keyboard review.
This copy and paste behavoir in X windows annoys me to no end too. It is a major pain sometimes and this is one thing I wish Unix/Linux/X-Windows would copy from the windows environment. I just wanted to make sure the rest of the world knew it.
Obviously you don't use linux if you have a girlfriend.
No shit, he said it himself. He is on Windows using Trillion. Read the parent again dumbass.
Come on everybody, it's time to stop making excuses.
There are only 3 toolkits that matter now.
GTK (Gnome, Mozilla, Open Office)
QT (KDE,etc)
Java (Swing and SWT)
If all these three toolkits agreed on common mime types and cut/paste UI I think the whole problem would be solved because they together make up 90% of the app usage on the Linux desktop.
The next problem however is to make a network transparent embedded object cut and paste and this is going to require a distributed object protocol like CORBA. Unfortunately CORBA is a beast.
As others have said, most applications support both types of clipboards. The ones that only support one, or confuse the two, are becoming few and far between (in my experience).
That said, I've become so accustomed to the select->middle click routine that I find myself missing it in Windows or non-X11 apps in Mac OS X. The biggest problem is obviously wanting to replace the selected text with pasted text, but I find myself working around that.
I use tons of tabs while browsing, so I've become accustomed to opening new tabs and hitting the middle mouse button in the location bar. No clicking to focus on it, it just works. Alternatively, you could middle-click on the window itself (at least in Mozilla), but I usually use the former way.
I find myself wanting to replace rather than append mostly while word processing. Fortunately, Open Office's clipboard support works well for me, so I use the standard ctrl-c ctrl-v method there.
Because the support for both clipboards is nearly universal in the applications I use, I find myself far preferring X11 to Windows because I have a choice.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Yes, there is a common clipboard mechanism. Once you understand that there are two separate clipboards (and that this is a feature), everything makes sense.
l - sp ec/clipboards.txt
Here's how it behaves in modern X environments like KDE 3, GNOME, XFCE, etc.:
- There is a clipboard (called CLIPBOARD in the specs), which you interact with by explicit copy and paste commands, for which the key bindings are conventionally Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+X to copy, paste and cut respectively. Use it whenever you would use the Windows or Mac OS clipboard, teach it to new users, and so on.
- As an extra "easter egg", applications can manipulate the selection (the currently highlighted text) using the same API. The convention is to select text by dragging (or Shift+cursor keys, etc.) and to copy the selection from another program by pressing the middle mouse button. I will reassert: this is an "easter egg" for advanced users. The specs call this the "primary selection", PRIMARY (there is also a SECONDARY, but I am not aware of any program that uses it).
As documented here:
http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.htm
http://pdx.freedesktop.org/Standards/clipboards
OK, now the holes in that logical explanation:
- KDE 2 used to use Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V to manipulate PRIMARY. This was wrong and had all the flaws the poster cites. Solution: Upgrade to KDE 3, problem solved.
- Some other broken apps do the same. Solution: either fix them as you suggest, or stop using them. GNU Emacs 20 was apparently broken in the same way as KDE 2, while XEmacs and GNU Emacs 21 apparently work in the same way as KDE 3 (I can't confirm this, I use vim myself).
- Some (usually older) apps (like xterm) don't have copy or paste commands at all, but do have the selection/middle-click behaviour. Solution: either use something else (e.g. Konsole if you're a KDE fan) or learn the middle-click behaviour too. Since the command line is generally considered to be "hard", it shouldn't be that much of an intellectual leap.
- Ctrl+C already means something very common and specific (send a SIGINT) in console windows, so the standard Windows-style keybindings cannot be used in console windows. This is a historical clash between the Unix/DOS "Ctrl+C interrupts" and the Windows/OS2 "Ctrl+C copies" (on the Mac the convention is actually Command-C, so Ctrl is still available, and OS X's Terminal uses it as you'd expect) - Windows' MS-DOS-derived command prompt has the same conflict and a similar solution.
In a nutshell, there are TWO completely different clipboards implemented in X:
These two clipboards do not affect or interact with each other.
Other OS's (like Windows) only have the second kind. Modern Unix applications (like anything based on GTK, QT, or Mozilla) support both clipboards simultaneously and independently.
Old X Windows applications like XTerm only support the first kind. This is why you can't copy from or paste into an XTerm using C-c and C-v.
So if you are using modern applications, you should always be able to use C-c and C-v. If you have to copy or paste something into an XTerm, you will have to select it and middle-click. The solution is to use a moderm terminal, like gnome-terminal, instead of XTerm.
If you read the article, you'll learn that there are actually three different clipboards in X (one of which is never used), and that Emacs and XEmacs then implement yet another fourth clipboard!
Also see the freedesktop.org reference.
Here's an idea, publically disclosed so no evil little fuck can patent it:
Whenever PRIMARY changes, make the secondary selection the previous primary, and add a "Swap" menu item + shortcut to make Cut/Copy/Paste/Swap.
Use Case:
Highlight some text "hello", lets say the highlight is bright blue background.
Go to somewhere else, highlight some more text "goodbye". "goodbye" becomes bright blue background indicating it is now PRIMARY. "hello" has become faded blue, indicating it is now SECONDARY.
Now "Swap". "hello"+"goodbye" exchange places! I think "hello" in its new position should have the PRIMARY selection, and "goodbye" in its new position the SECONDARY, as that's where the user will "be" after swapping, and a second "Swap" will restore the text to its original state.
Most cut/paste operations I do are reorganisations of that nature. Other people might differ - but it's certainly one of those features that would keep legal people loyal to a word processor, say.
I think it would be dead handy, and no-one I know is doing it.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
At the end of the day, I often find myself ready to go to bed and find that my computer (which I normally turn off at night) is still powered on. Is there a way for me to turn off the computer that takes absolutely no effort on MY part? Ideally, this method would merely require me to will the PC off. Can anyone show me how to implement this form of "cybertelepathy?"
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
The real story is why doesn't Linux have a clipboard standard with well-defined interop standards ala OLE/COM?
I can copy text from VS and paste it into Word, in which case it pastes as RTF with colors and formatting. If I paste it into notepad, I get plain text. This is because the clipboard understands high-level text (RTF) and casting that down into standard text. It also allows apps to provide multiple data formats; copying an image can put a JPG, Bitmap, and PNG on the clipboard and the consuming app can select the format it likes best.
Even better would be to support Office-style multiboard functionality where there are 10-12 "slots" on the clipboard and you can cut and paste from each slot at will.
(Ex: in VS, CTRL+SHIFT+V will cycle through each of the last X copied items for pasting, meaning you can go to one spot of code and copy, then another and copy, then open a different source file and copy a block, then paste all three together somewhere else very easily.)
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
...in Soviet Russia, text copies YOU!
----------
Something cleverMaybe you could apply.... ...wait for it... ...FORETHOUGHT!
...and OHMYGOD it's the same number of steps as:
If you know you're going to copy something you could follow the following steps:
1) highlight
2) delete
3) highlight
4) middle click
1) hightlight
2) C
3) highlight
4) V
Most X apps use a single clipboard for both ctrl-c/ctrl-v copying and selecting to copy. Some such as KDE and Opera do use two seperate clipboards, but most do not use the windows style clipboard at all.
In Firefox, if you press Ctrl-L it will highlight the contents of the location bar in the current tab without copying it to the Middle-Click buffer. Then you can delete it with backspace, and Middle-Click in the now-empty location bar to paste the URL you previously highlighted with the mouse. (Works for me, anyway.)
To summarize:
1. Highlight URL with mouse.
1.5 Bring focus to Firefox window (TM)*.
2. Press Ctrl-L
3. Press Backspace
4. Middle-Click the mouse.
5. Press Enter to visit the URL you just pasted.
6. Generate advertising hits for website whose URL you just visited.
7. They profit!
*"window" is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
One of the main factors driving me to continue to use windows as a major productivity tool are the common keyboard shortcuts throughout each application and the os to perform tasks. Not just the basic cut n' paste, but also undo(ctrl-z), hightlight all(ctrl-a), the windows key shortcuts (win-m, win-d, win-e etc). The list goes on. If you want to do anything fast you need to use the keyboard. And in windows I assume that certain keystrokes will perform as implied. 95% of the time they will.
:)
What linux needs is to agree on a common set of keyboard shortcuts. sort of a best practices that everyone adheres to.
yes you can "configure" everything to work the way you want, but how annoying is that? I don't want to spend my precious time setting up the computer. I just want to turn it on and have everything work.
one day...
X should provide a selection mechanism for user interface customization, and then pass that on to every application. If there was a common cut and paste mechanism then this would be even better. Apps could still reserve a buffer for themselves. There is more than one answer to most interface decisions and this will continue, there is no use in insisting that the current behavior is "right" and everyone better learn it. What is needed is that the user be able to select an interface model at the top level and that it be honored by all apps running under that level. The reason I adopted Linux is to able to fix interface problems and not be stuck with the choices that someone else made.
This solution has a serious drawback, though. You'll get used to have two clipboards handy (the middle-mouse one and the ctrl-v one), and will be completely unable to use a Windows machine again!
Here is a little discussion of how copy and paste works in X. Don't know if its all absolutely right myself, but jwz seems like a clever guy.
clod!
Those are not old. Those are a copy of Cmd-C Cmd-V from the Mac.
The original old shortcuts for Microsoft Windows are Ctrl+Ins and Shift+Ins. And when I'm on a Microsoft Windows station, my fingers are doing them without me thinking. But alas, less and less application support them, nowadays.
If Microsoft managed to change, in the course of a few years, such a fundamental characteristic of the UI, why X could not ?
KDE can be configured to keep 2 seperate clipboards (and AFAIK it's configured by default that way) and when you use Ctrl+X/C/V, you will never need to know that there is another way to copy and paste.
If you are using vi, you can have 26 different registers to cut/copy to and paste from.
I happen to love the copy/paste in Linux. If this ends up being one more way in which the window managers abandon things that were unique to become a closer clone to Windows, I am going to scream! Why even use anything else, how about just using Windows and placing "Linux" in the title bars so we can all pretend we are using something different!
Maybe too late in the discussion thread to get an answer, but am I the only person left who uses Control+Insert to copy text, and Shift+Insert to paste it?
And then there's also Shift+Delete to CUT text.
I'm sure Shift+(direction) to highlight text is well known, and Shift+Ctl+(direction) to jump words. Plus Shift+Home for beginning of line, Shift+Ctl+Home for top of doc, and ditto with the End key. And don't forget PgUp/PgDn.
Each of these key combinations, which are as automatic to me as touch typing, occasionally don't work in the small collection of Linux apps I've used so far. At least I know now that I'm not alone!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
who copied and pasted his code all over the place instead of writing a function ( this was C ). This pastes in two copies.. would have been perfect for him because that's the way he coded!
I really can't blame him, though. We were, after all, being rated on our k-locs.
Highlighting having the side-effect of copying is just unintuitive and often the wrong behavior. It's speculating that you will want to copy the highlighted text, but often times you want to delete the highlighted text without clobering your copy buffer. or maybe you might just want to highlight the text to mark your spot.
Except that highlighting text in X doesn't copy - at least not like in Windows. If you click in the window where you highlighted and un-highlight the text, you cannot paste it, anymore. Text copied with Ctrl-C can always be pasted, until you use Ctrl-C, again.
If you can't tell the difference between Left-Middle and Ctrl-C-Ctrl-V, you've got bigger problems than X's usability.
I agree with you. Nearly every time someone posts an honest criticism of Linux usability or compares an open source app to a commercial app, someone responds similarly. Comments like yours are generally modded down as overrated, troll, or flamebait.
In this case, it's ludicrous to argue that the middle-click is better because "it's always been done that way." If users find it easier to CTRL-C/V, then it should be done that way instead.
If Linux makes an improvement upon some usability issue, people will gravitate toward it. If it's harder to use, they will stay away (unless something else attracts them).
10 Highlight text you want to copy
20 Press CTRL C
30 Highlight text you want to delete
40 Press CTRL V
50 PRINT 'Happy Camper'
Proving that MiCrOsOfT is teh 1337.
For a while, I was really annoyed about the select+middle-click paradigm. I tried selected an URL, then would select the text in Konq's location bar, and when I'd middle-click, the clipboard contained the text previously in the location bar.
Later I found out that if you selected an URL, you can simply middle-click in an empty part of a Konqueror window, and the URL will open. Works for searching Google too!
...the mousebutton is the middle button. YOU.
What decade are you in , the 80s? Most X apps use Zawinski's explanation of X Clipboards these days. KDE isn't an application, its a desktop suite - there are hundreds of KDE applications, and hundreds of GNOME applications, all of which follow the modern clipboard rules set out on freedesktop.org.
Fun though.
Wasn't this the very thing that open source was supposed to avoid?
You don't like the copy and paste works? Fine - you've got the source code, so just change the key codes and recompile.... right?
After a few frustrating hours of digging through source code, you finally find the keybindings. You change them, do a make.... and make crashes. So then you debug the make script and realize that you _ALSO_ need the source code to an obscure set of libraries. So you Google it, download the source, and it ALSO won't compile, because you've got the wrong compiler version.
So you figure, what the heck, it's time to upgrade gcc anyway. You download the sources, compile it, only to find that you also need to download the sources for the shared libraries as well. Tomorrow, you'll resume.
Well the weekend is coming up, and you've finally got the compiler and all its dependent sources together, and you start the compile. It actually compiles and installs just fine... And then you try to compile those obscure libraries and the compiler crashes. Turns out there's a kernel bug which means the new version of the compiler won't work with older kernels. You think, well heck, I'll just upgrade my kernel, and you ftp the sources.
So you configure your kernel and then type 'make clean; make dep; make install' and kick off the process; it dies - once again, your compiler segfaults. So now you've got an older kernel with no way to compile the new one...
So next weekend you decide that you're just going back to the old compiler. You rpm -i the compiler, and start the kernel compile process again... but the new kernel won't compile with the older compiler, and the newer compiler won't run on an older kernel....
You take a walk. It's nice to see the sunshine, and feel the breeze for a change.
It's tuesday and you've figured out that you can apply a few patches to your current compiler source, compile that, and then you'll be able to compile the most recent version of the compiler. So you do that. After you've built your intermediate version, you install it, build your kernel, and then recompile the newest compiler sources. After a reboot, you're able to successfully compile those obscure shared libraries, and rebuild your application.
Then you fire up your modified ctrl-c, ctrl-v enhanced software....
It segfaults. For no apparent reason.
So you Google the newsgroups, and lo and behold, someone else is having the same problem! But they don't know what the problem is.
Next week, your newsgroup buddy has found the problem. It turns out that a change in the way gcc handles memory allocation causes your obscure libraries to crash when compiled with the newer versions. They recommend using an older version of the compiler to build the software.
So you go back to the intermediate version, recompile, and finally, everything works great. For a few days, you've been enjoying the benefits of ctrl-c ctrl-v copy and paste. Life is good.
And then, you notice that KDE starts crashing at random for some unknown reason...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
As control+C doesn't always work and sometimes shuts programs down, I tend to use control+insert to copy and shift+insert to paste. It works nearly everywhere (including Windows, DOS, and the Solaris machines at my university).
Hope that helps someone.
Since it's Unix, if you aren't happy with the way things work, you just fix it, like the people at gcb.
If I am forced to use windows I go nuts because this behavior is NOT happening.
It isn't broke, there is nothing to fix, that is the way it is and we like it that way.
If you really don't like it, write something to change that behavior and opensource it so others like you can use it and stop asking slashdot questions like these.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
I use paintbrush icon in galeon.
Highlight the text with mouse. Click paintbrush so URL vanishes. Paste with middle button.
Simpler and more natural than what you do.
The fact that copy/paste is buggy or sluggish under X-Windows has a simple reason: There are tons of SDKs for X-Windows, almost all of them using a separate clipboard implementation/mechanism. Saying that you deal with a technical problem by getting used to it, is saying that technology will fail to address the problem. As you say, "Linux is different" (almost true, since it has almost nothing to do with Linux, but rather with X-Windows). I would rather say: X-Windows clipboard management sucks. If you want to use Linux on the desktop, you'll have to get used to it.
While true, I found a rather interesting "workaround" when I explained to my mother how to use her new Linux desktop (disclaimer: she asked me to move her to Linux, and after several weeks of me asking her "why do you want to learn something new?" and setting an expectation for what she'd find on Linux, I finally moved her to Red Hat Linux. Also, I have run Linux 100% as my desktop since 1998.)
The "workaround" was to explain that Linux has two different kinds of clipboards, and it would work differently for her under Linux than the clipboard worked under Windows. I explained it like this:
Yes, I know this is not technically the correct explanation. But when trying to explain how the copy/paste thing works to a non-Linux user, I found this simplification made it easy for her to understand. And it set the right expectation - she never asks about why copy/paste acts the way it does. My mother (not a technical user) had the expectation set for her that Linux was not Windows, so copy/paste wouldn't work just like Windows. The concept of "local" vs "global" clipboards was different, but then again she was on a different operating system. It didn't take her any time to get used to this - she understood right from the start when to use middle-click and when to use copy/paste.
Interestingly, I was in the next room when I heard her explain this to one of her (also non-technical) friends. She said something like "...and that's why you can do copy/paste from the file manager, but you can't just middle-click the file there." I smiled, since it was technically not copy/paste in Nautilus, but I thought it was neat that the simplified concept of "local" vs "global" clipboards seemed to work so well for her.
I suppose I'll go to hell for telling a white lie about how it really works. :-)
In emacs, the keys for this would be Alt-W (to copy), Ctrl-W (to cut), Alt-2 Ctrl-Y (for yank second kill ring entry). Sounds complex, but it's second nature after awhile.
emacs is clever, no doubt about it. And to this day no-one has written a better or more capable text editor.
You can use standard Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V if you want. They should behave exactly the same as on Windows. If they don't, it's a bug.
At the same time, you can use highlight-middle-click.
Can't say I've ever had this issue. I use klipper. Multiple clipboard entries. Highlight doesn't copy until I right click and copy or hit the key. And I can do multiple clipboards. What's the issue.
i hate the copy and paste thing on windows, it's annoying; for example i highlight something, then press my middle button and nothing happens. I have to go back highlight, key-bombo, go back to the other app, and key-kombo i can't think of anything more annoying in windows that that.
well maybe the fact that it crashes at least a couple of times a second.
We should get mouse manufacturers to add 4 small buttons to the mouse directly underneath the normal buttons so you can just curve your fingers a little and have Cut, Copy, Paste, and Delete. Wouldn't that make the most sense and fuck all this other shit?
"I grew up on Windows machines, using the ol' ctrl-c to copy and ctrl-v to paste"
:) Besides getting a programable mouse and setting the middle button to ctrl-v that is.
Doesn't anyone else see a problem with that line? any ol' windows user wouldn't be hooked on ctrl-c, ctrl-v, etc.. Originally the MS apps didn't have any standard at all, word, notepad, and every other word processing app for windows did it's own thing. It was sorta understandable between different companies products but it took a while for even MS apps to standardize. It wasn't until later they copied the Mac and standardized on ctrl x, c, v
The other question I have is how do I get the middle button to paste in Windows?
No offense, but this arrogance is exactly why Linux has insignificant desktop market share.
Sorry to interrupt you on your high horse, but talk about jumping to conclusions. "This arrogance" is demonstrated by some poster on slashdot and somehow this is representative of the "Linux community". Give me a break.
It took her long enough to figure out Ctrl-c Ctrl-v; she doesn't want to learn another behavior.
For most modern X apps, ctrl-c/ctrl-v work just fine. See for example the Gnome HIG.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I use the old key combinations from the editor that came with MS DOS (edit.com). They still work in practically all windows programs and I'm pretty sure some Linux programs support them as well, although I don't know how many.
ctrl+insert: copy
shift+insert: insert
shift+delete cut
This makes perfect sense (at least the last two) because they actually insert and delete text respectively. In the good old DOS days ctrl+c usually terminated a program as well as several built-in DOS commands (like if you do a "dir/p" and decide you don't want to hit ENTER a million times) although some programs used ctrl+break instead and some used both.
>>my mother has postgraduate education, has started a successful business, is a successful archaeologist
... as far as Panama. We'll ship it there."
Grave robbing is now called a business? Who knew.
"I can toss in the hair on the scalp for free Baron. She was wearing a copper headpiece when we found her. Now you just need to fly it say
This is a common mistake. In reality:
/they are broken/. Don't blame *nix, or X, blame the author of the app. Some apps are deliberately broken (because it makes More Sense[tm]) but not terribly many.
Highlighting text puts it into the X selection buffer.
Middle clicking pastes the X selection buffer.
CTRL+C (or whatever copy is set to) puts text onto the X clipboard.
CTRL+V (or whatever) pastes the X clipboard.
Notice: THERE ARE TWO BUFFERS. The X selection buffer and the X clipboard buffer. If your app overwrites the clipboard on highlight then it s misbehaving (see fd.o for what is "right").
Adjust your thinking just a smidge: When you select, it does not copy. It acts just like in Windows... only you can also access the last selection on a way Windows prevents.
Repeat: If your apps do not behave this way,
I want my Cowboyneal
Copy and paste not working consistantly/as expected is one of the issues that will keep linux from being widely accepted.
Until data can be copied and pasted between all applications in a consistant manner, linux will not be ready for the desktop. period.
The only thing that would make it really nice is if you middle click to paste and the highlighted text was the same as the clipboard text then it would pste the previous clipboard contents.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Very useful for copying between Java text areas and other X apps.
Incidentally, I find it highly ironic that Java, which was born and raised in the X-based Solaris, does not have any way whatsoever to get at the primary selection -- unless you want to write impure java.
Fortunately I don't have to use Windows all that much.
Seriously, under OpenWindows/OpenLook, the cut/copy/paste keys on the left side of a Sun keyboard work great.
As does the find key - highlight the text you want to search for, move the mouse cursor into another window, and hit the find key, and your selection from the first window will be highlighted in the second.
Thanks to its Open Source, Linux is customizable by anybody, not just your local bloodthirsty corporation! So delve into the source and tweak it to your heart's content!
sites like slashdot, sa and 2/4chan people will purposefully not create clickable links, but type the URL-as-text. Just select, CTRL+N, middle click, no problem.
The only thing that gets you is slashdot's page-widening-defeating mechanism. But you still have a chance to correct the typos in the URL bar if it 404s on you.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
What I've trained myself to do is this: in Mozilla/Konq/etc., Ctrl-U erases the line. So, I highlight the URL i want, click on the current (unwanted) URL, hit Ctrl-U to remove it, and hit the middle button to paste the new URL. Works for me...
The problem with using a mouse button to copy and paste is that the cursor frequenly moves on you from the force of clicking the mouse button. It drives me nuts everytime I carefully highlight a big block of text only to have my mouse shift just enought for me to lose my highlighting. The windows method of using the keyboard to mark a cut/paste ensures that the mouse doesn't move.
Hate to admit it but the windows method is better.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
You can drag and drop stuff all over the place in Mac OS X. True, not EVERY application supports drag and drop. However, it's a high enough percentage that if this functionality isn't included, you can probably find another program that *does* have it.
Text, graphics, URL's, even entire address book entries are handled (usually) intelligently. Drop a person from your address book to the Mail.app icon, it starts a new message to that person - drop it on an Address Book Group, the person is added to the group. It's only slightly less flawless for non-Apple applications, but there's almost always basic drag-and-drop functionality, because it's built in to Apple's developer templates and objects.
I agree with one of the other posters who said the highlighting thing is "unintuitive" - it is. Copy and paste is better, but drag-and-drop is about as intuitive as it gets - though I am glad splat-C and splat-V are there.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
I find the Windows way of kill/yanking really annoying. While using Windows, I keep missing the select/middle click method of kill/yanking.
from foo import signature
I'm not sure why people think of highlight-and-middle-click as pasting. It's more like a drag-and-drop operation except that you don't have to keep the left mouse button down during the drag and you can rearrange windows before you drop. Apart from that, all the behavior is exactly identical to drag-and-drop.
Control-C and Control-V are copy and paste (and use the CLIPBOARD). They work just like Windows (or like the Mac clipboard). If an app doesn't work right with these, it's just broken. File a bug on the app.
In Mozilla and Firebird at least there is the very useful, but little-known shortcut Ctrl-L. This highlights the url bar but does *not* copy it to the clipboard. So when I'm in that situation I do Ctrl-L, delete, middle click.
Of course, the middle-click on the page body works too, as long as you don't have to edit the URL. Ctrl-L is still super-handy if you want to type in an URL by hand or something.
You know what I hate? Wait, what do you like? I hate that!
I have to know what I am doing before I start. If I want to quickly highlight somehting and then move it into another app I use middle click, but if I plan to replace exising text then I copy/paste. I have yet to find an application that I use regularly that does not support a paste that does not involve the middle button.
The issue here is keeping your 'clipboards' straight in your mind. Remember what is in you middle button clipboard, yout Ctl+c clipboard, and what is in your Ctrl+k killring.
If I ever do select to paste, and then realize that I am planning on replacing text, I put the cursor at the beginning of the text to replace middle click and then Ctrl+k to eradicate the old text. Because the cursor moves to the end of the new text but is still before the old text I have my new text and no old text.
Granted, this is a little more complicted than the ms Cc Cv paradigm. But the linux setup allows more flexibility and power. If more complicated and more powerful does not describe Linux perfectly then I must be using a different OS than you.
My issues revolve around hitting ctrl-a ctrl-k in abiword or OO and trying to turn my entire document into a link.
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
The select - middle click system is so much faster to use (for me) that I feel crippled when running Windows. If you take it away, I'll hate you for it.
you can do things that should (IMHO) be in the codebase, like re-ordering tabs, moving tabs in groups, moving tabs between windows, opening duplicate tabs (complete with the tab's page history), and (my favorite) undoing the closing of a tab
Opera does all of these things natively.
I think this is a really tough issue because there are two different paradigms as far as applications being used, and the two types of edit commands are separately suited to the two application types.
For graphical applications, the Ctrl commands are more convenient. They copy when you want them to, you can highlight text to replace before you paste over it, you can keep something in the clipboard for a while without worrying about losing it if you accidentally "drag" your mouse a little while placing the cursor, etc.
That doesn't work well at all in terminal windows. Ctrl-C is an actual command there, so it can't be used. Also, your cursor is always at a fixed location, so as soon as you select your text, it's a given where it is going to be pasted, so a middle click anywhere will put it where the cursor is--very convenient.
Two very specifically tailored solutions that don't work well together, and I think that you would get a very high correlation between mouse-edit fans being command line jockeys, and Ctrl-edit fans mostly using graphical apps.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
This is one of the problems with Linux in general, the attitude of "YOU must bend to the almighty OS!!". Sorry, but Windows has proven that a usuable (or at least popular) OS must be convienent for the user, not the OS writer.
If 99% of the world (or whatever %) uses windows and expect windows keyboard shortcuts to work then why not use them in X? It might actually make it, *GASP!*, easier to use.
You think that is confusing? Try this one....in a application I work on (in windows), you have to hit Shitf-Delete to Copy and Shift-Insert to paste. You can even do this with Ctrl-c stuff and in fact thats what you do when copying from a browser to this application window.
Gorkman
I'm pretty sure those options are available in both the win32 and Linux versions.
Opera's URL is http://www.opera.com, FYI.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Really, the sun doesn't rise and set over Redmond Wash. UNIX/X has been using the middle button to paste for a decade or so. If you want to use UNIX you shouldn't expect it to be just like Windows. What is it with this low self esteem problem! People don't migrate to the Mac and expect IT to act like Windows but everybody migrates to Linux/X and sits around bitching because it isn't Windows. KDE and GNOME are terrified of doing anything that doesn't look like Windows because it might hurt adoption. Bull!
Linux/UNIX/X/GNU/blah is a different culture, just like Mac. Just because YOU dual boot the same machine to play games doesn't change that reality. And if you really decide you don't like UNIX culture just keep running Windows... or go buy a Mac if you would like something that won't contribute to the Outlook worm problem.
Democrat delenda est
Credit where it's due; Microsoft's clipboard, like a lot (but not quite all) of their user interface, is very good. My only real complaint is the difficulty sometimes of pasting a richtext or html selection as plain text in a richtext- or html-aware application. Though I've found with the better apps (Office, Visual Studio.NET, etc.) this is handled rather elegantly.
All's true that is mistrusted
I know its hard to understand comming from windows, but I came from windows, and the first time that I saw the automagically copy-paste on unix, i thougth to myself: "Damn !! This is good "
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
I can't believe this is a story on /.
Ok yeah the two systems copy and paste differently. If you want both systems to behave the same, then won't they just BE the same? Then you should upgrade from whatever unix you're using to Windows.
It is not hard at all to remember that in my Windows apps, it's CTRL-[CV], and in that terminal window I'm running it's highlight/click.
Here's my submission for Ask/. -
"Dealing with Unix File Management"
I Hate that I have to remember it's "rm" on unix and "del" on Windows. Any words of wisdom?
"The X clipboard is not broken, you just don't understand it"
And this is one of the reasons why Linux won't be the desktop OS of choice for the masses any time soon, becoming defensive about it (you can't criticize Linux/X!) instead of trying to think of a solution.
Back in college (about '93 or so) I got frustrated enough by this to write a little X app to build multiple cut-buffers and rotate through them. Something like 10-20 lines of C. Bound it to a twm menu, and ta-da. Highlight, click, highlight, delete, click, paste. I'm sure someone has written something far more usefull in the same genre by now..
I'd rather have it the way we have it today than have all unixes behave exactly like Windows.
...
I would not want an OS that passes MY mothers tests for the same reason I do not want to drive a car that passes a "my mother" test.
Apps that have a consistant interface is a Mac OS thing, used (less successfully) in windows, Amiga OS, TOS, and nearly every GUI oriented UI but X/unix. The "mother" test is excellent test as long as it is not the only test. The book The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper describes the problems with UI's and offers an comprehensive method to fix them, of which having a set of diverse users "critique" the UI is a large part. Well worth the read, even though it is not easy to agree with everything the "father of Visual Basic" has to offer. Even more gui specific design (and a different view) on the problem can be found by asking Tog
The users of X have figured out how to do copy-paste the X-way and probably don't want to learn another behaviour.
Yes, that is the problem! With X, almost every app has a different behavour. You can't tell me you really use X/unix and this has never bothered you?
I am living proof of the Peter Principle
And this is the attitude that annoys existing Linux users:
If users find it easier to CTRL-C/V, then it should be done that way instead.
Which users? Windows users? What abut the existing UNIX users? Remeber, a `user' isn't just your aunt Tilly, they are also the people creating the system, and they'll create it the way they like it (anything else would be silly). Besides, it should all be configurable anyway.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It is just an OS not a religion, though you seem to think it is.
As the parent and others have posted, X11 has TWO (well, three but no one uses the third) clipboards. One is highlight/middle-click, and one is Copy/Paste. The proper, documented (see parent and others) behavior is for both to be implemented and for both to operate completely and entirely independently of each other.
In a properly implemented program, you should be able to use it as if there is no Primary Selection feature (highlight/middle-click) and not notice the difference from your usual Windows/Mac Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V habits. If you come across a program that does not do that, and mixes them together, that is not a feature that is a bug. Report it as a bug. If the developer dismisses it, report it as a bug again, email the developer telling him that you're going elsewhere, and switch to any of the plethora of other programs around (Free Software is great like that) that do things properly. Eventually someone will get the message.
That's one reason why I stick to KDE applications whenever possible. All KDE applications (ie, ones provided by the KDE.org team) are well-behaved and non-buggy in this respect. Programs that misbehave should simply not be used. Period.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
I don't really know what the issue is. There really are few programs out there that on Linux _don't_ use GTK or QT and use their cut/paste semantics, which I am quite familiar with. It works just like Windows...
The problem I have is switching from *nix to Windows and losing the concept of the "primary" selection. You don't have to use middle-click = insert primary if you don't want to... it's not necessary anymore.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
and it works a lot better.
I am living proof of the Peter Principle
OK, here's a situation I can't figure out.
1: I have some text that I've placed in the buffer (yank, deleted, whatever)
2: I would like to replace sections of my code with what's in the buffer. Is there a way to replace sections of code WITHOUT changing the value of the buffer? The slow way is to: find a section to replace, select it, put the buffer out, re-yank the buffer contents (as the buffer contains the code I replaced), repeat.
In windows it's just cntl-c, select,cntl-v,select,cntl-v,... repeat.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
I can't believe this is still an issue! I can't think of a single Linux app that I still use regularly that doesn't support Windows-and-Mac-style copy and paste. I just copied some text from OpenOffice to Mozilla to Konsole, no problem. The GNOME and KDE folks agreed on a common clipboard standard years ago, and probably 90% of popular Linux desktop apps conform.
Complaining because some free Linux apps still don't support the clipboard is like complaining that the Windows clipboard is broken because some freeware text editor doesn't copy and paste between programs.
Unless you have an alternative mouse on mouse laptops there is no middle click, hence no decent way to copy + paste in linux applications. I'm not about to setup something involving ctrl/alt etc to emulate a middle click when something like CTRL+V is so much more convenient, and reliable.
What's really annoying is applications that don't support that one since they will end up deleting your text instead. This is worse when it is not undoable.
Like Palm Desktop, which has helped me destroyed many a Memo entry accidentally. Not only does it delete the text instead of cutting it, it deletes the whole memo! Thanks, Palm Desktop. You suck!
I've read through the comments, and everyone seems to think the auto-copy is a bad thing. I'm sure after you've been stung by it that it is.
:) So, I'm often found highlighting something (especially on web pages) and closing the window only to discover that I never actually hit CTRL-C.
I'm in the windows world, and I have the opposite problem. TeraTerm (my emulator of choice) has copied this 'auto-copy' concept. So, if I want to copy something from in the terminal window, I just highlight it and quickly go on my way.
However, nothing else does.
I kept thinking that I'd like every program to do that for me...but I think what I really need to for TeraTerm to stop...so I get out of the habit.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
What the heck is that. ^U and ^K are for deleting. One of those on a Windows box maps to 'view source' in a browser, and nothing annoys me more than clicking in the address bad, hitting ^K^U to clear it, and instead having a source window pop out at me. Of course I avoid Windows whenever possible, so its not that big a problem. Mainly comes up when visiting family that thinks 'Open Source' is for crackpots.
Its all in what you are used to. Some people are used to the Windows way, some of us are used to the Unix way. You switch from one to the other, (regardless of the direction) and you will feel lost.
Hee.. I know that bug, malfunctions with copy & paste. You have Blaster virus!.. and svchost is down, Thats All ... Try Uninstall Wine or Booting Your Computer.
just kidding, of course >:D
-Woof woof woof!
No offense, but this arrogance is exactly why Linux has insignificant desktop market share.
It's really reassuring that so many people know exactly why Linux has insignificant desktop market share. Oddly enough, it's usually some random slashdotter's fault.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I DON'T CARE IF YOUR MOTHER WILL USE IT!!!
Why not give your mother an operating system designed for end-users, such as OS X? And before you start bitching about arrogance, high horses, etc, realize that we like things how they are because to those of us who don't mind learning, it's MUCH MORE EFFICIENT!
It's not arrogant to want a system that isn't dumbed down. The fact that we like a system doesn't mean we're on a high horse. Contrary to what you seem to think, we don't say "this is the correct behavior" just to piss you off, we say it because it is the correct behavior, simply because we like it.
Why do we have to adapt to people who already have a couple of operating systems that do what you seem to want?
As always, if you want a dumbed down interface, you're free to write one. You're assuming your ideas are better than ours, and I think that telling us that we have to change is just as "arrogant" as us saying we don't have to!
Well, I am bit tired of these "my mother" tests. There was also an aunt Tillie test, which was about the same. Both are actually completely irrelevant.
Why everybody encountering something that behaves differently than he/she expects starts complaining and claims that "it is the reason why Linux has an insignificant market share" ? Personally, I use Linux, Windows and sometimes Mac. Each is good for something else and they are (surprise!) tools, not a religion.
I am working with Linux most of the time but when I have to use Windows or Mac, I have problems because the things do not work as I am used to. Does it mean, that Windows or Mac will never have significant market share ? Actually, market share has nothing to do with usability but all with marketing, folks. You rarely get something sold or adopted just based on usability.
Back to the "mother test" - what is most important for adoption of Linux (or whichever OS or application) is not that, whether it behaves exactly the same as the thing you used before - if it did, why did you switch in the first place? Because it is "cool" ? I doubt it, that's only what the proverbial 13 year olds care about.
It all comes down to the motivation - is this new app or OS delivering something so new, that I can swallow the inconvenience of learning something different or putting up with something not working the way I was used to or am I just looking for an excuse why not switch ? If the answer is "yes, there is something that I need", then the app will get adoption regardless whether something silly as clipboard works the same as on Windows, Mac or whatever. If such problem deters you from using the application, you probably do not need its functionality enough and you did not need to switch to it in the first place.
An example for people complaining about Linux/Unix users being arrogant here. Disclaimer - the example holds in opposite direction as well, I didn't want to pick on some anti-americanism or some similar bull here.
In the U.S., most cars have A/C and automatic gearbox. Here in Europe, they mostly lack both. If an American comes to Europe and rents a car, discovering this fact, do you think that the clutch pedal will automagically disappear and the gearbox change to automatic just because he was used to have it that way at home ? No, it wont, the driver has to adapt and learn how to drive manually or rent another car. Does it mean, that such cars would not sell, because the manufacturers are arrogant and expecting the users to adapt ? Somehow doesn't compute neither. In the case of the car, it came down to the decision - "Do I need to drive so badly that I can put up with it or am I rather going to walk ?"
To conclude this my little rant, I agree, that the cut/copy-paste behavior on Linux is inconsistent sometimes and that there are applications which are broken and need to be fixed. However, this not Linux specific issue at all and hardly something preventing its adoption :-(
Wow. A lot of people are really confuse by "highlight = select". I love it. The huffman coding is excellent. I always get tripped up going back to windows frankly. I also get tripped up on some X apps at work that decided to no implement the standard mouse select stuff. (I mean the most basic highlight = select, middle click = paste)
It honestly hasn't been a problem for me in unix unless someone tries to over ride the behavior or screws up the primary/secondary buffer thing. For URLs in the browser, I just middle click in the window. For pasting 'over' text (like some have complained about) I just paste the new text when I want to go and then highlight the text I want to get rid of and delete it.
I know the select and pasting lacks consistency on unix , but I hope they never get rid of the simple highlight and paste mechanism. To me, doing it like Windows is not necessarily doing it right.
OK, I'm at loss at how behaviour that, by design does not permit one to replace a highlighted section of a text with anther one, can in any way be considered "more flexible".
Use it to your advantage and *use* both of the clipboards you are given. Think about it, you want to copy some text, use ctrl-c/v but then you also want to delete some text, you high light it,making it go into your second clipboard then delete it. Uh oh, you need that text back for some reason, and you have been ctrl-c/ving a lot, in a normal world, it would be gone. However, in this world with *two* clipboards, it will still be there (atleast in theory). I know it has saved my butt with urls and random text that I wanted but never gotten around to saving all while ctrl-c/ving a lot.
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
...but only questions, no answers...
Considered harmful.
Main Problem in the whole X C&P issue (there are others, yes) is the blatant lack for unification. Actually, there are as many kinds of C&P handling as there are programs, and there is no non-empty cut of the features. As people have noted, Mark Left - Click Middle works often, as do other Features, but sometimes, they do not (Try Matlab [yes i know, it's not FOSS, but hey, i do live in the real world], Emacs and XTerm at the same time...). The lack is simple and obvious: there is no such thing as abstraction of the "Copy" and "Paste" commands (as it should - after all that's one of the big points of GUI...), so that the user could go and put it on any key he likes. This is the one big problem that X C&P has.
Oh and then is the confusion about different copy buffers. I just assume that whoever came up with this was just smoking crack.
X is hell. Every single day working with X, i get reminded to how X was written: a quick hack to do remote debugging. We all deserve better, and we all could code for a better UI system. All you X zealots, go and try a mac for a week, then come back and we can talk...
How about having drag with the middle mouse select the region to be replaced?
Just use the old UUCP :)
dunno if anybody mentioned this already control-insert (copy) shift-insert (paste) works everywhere.
- Select some text, go to middle-click-paste but discover that the destination already has text in it (this Ask Slashdot issue).
- The clipboard disappears when you quit the application. Try it: copy some text, quit the app that you copied it from, and then try to paste.
- You can only copy and paste plain text. Sure, it's theoretically possible to push alternate mime types up there too but that gets heavy really quick. I have yet to see a non-plain-text clipboard move correctly between two different Linux apps.
Gnome Clipboard Daemon tries to fix the second problem. I have no idea how to fix the third. And here's a proposed solution for the first problem:Almost every text-entry box ever made has some sort of label or widget on its left identifying it (the URL bar has little "Go" or world icons, dialog boxes have "Labels: ", etc). Just adopt the convention that a middle-click on the text box's label replaces all the text in the box with the primary X selection. For example, middle clicking on the little world icon next to the left of the URL box would replace the URL with the current selection (but would not automatically go there, allowing you to edit it before hitting return). A middle click inside the textbox itself inserts text as it always has.
It's intuitive, consistent, finger-compatible and easy to implement, especially if the toolkits support it natively.
What gives Windows the edge is its universal clipboard. The whole highlight-and-middle-click thing is an X shortcut (which can be really handy), while OpenOffice has its own clipboard, as does Mozilla, as does KDE, etc etc... What you need, my friend, is a unified clipboard that will pick up every Edit->Copy, every Ctrl+C, every +y, etc... Enter Gnome Clipboard Daemon. I know it says it's for Gnome, but it really shouldn't. I use it with my Gnome and my girlfriend's KDE, and it works beautifully in both cases. It should also work without a DE (eg, fluxbox or whatever). It provides a unified clipboard that can handle just about anything you can throw at it. I haven't been disappointed with it yet. Check it out at http://members.chello.nl/~h.lai/gnome-clipboard-da emon/
Am I the only one using the old school cut, copy, paste keyboard sequences?
lick the cancle button (at least thats what our Chinese QA says)
Probably too late for anyone to read this now, but meh.
I've seen many comment calling for standardization of copy and paste shortcut keys, and many arguments against the ctrl-c/ctrl-v keys due to issues like dvorak keyboards and mouse handedness (kinda silly, I'm left-handed and I don't see any problem with using my right on the mouse.)
IMO, the best way to please everyone is not forcing them to use one set of bindings. Have X handle the keys, but let them be rebindable inside the X config file. Ideally, this would be much more flexible than hardcoding copy/paste.
Alternatitvely, X could leave this alone and let the desktop environment be responsible (since most DE's allow rebinding already), but this would leave a few users in the cold for a while if they only use a simple window manager.
Well, guess I'll sit back and wait for someone to tell me I'm wrong or that this already exists. guurh?
You've got 8% of my love - 8% of my love - 8/100's of the time you're the only girl I'm dreaming of.
I see a lot of people here badmouthing select and middle-click. Let me RUN to its defense.
The ^C ^V paradigm irritates the crap out of me. I LOVE middle-click paste.
I only have a problem with it when things (like TORA, for instance) don't use it properly.
^C ^V is one of the reasons (along with the crappy foreground window model) that I feel horribly encumbered and inefficient in Windows.
While I understand the urge to select and replace, but if you really want it, add a modifier key like control to your select action, and arrange for that NOT to replace the primary selection.
The fault isn't with middle-button paste, here. It's with forcing a Macintosh-ism onto a nice, clean X paradigm.
...but not for user interfaces in general.
it's a braindamaged design, like apple's non-proportional sliders in macos (took them ~12 years to fix that!)
The X clipboard certainly provides everything an application would need to support copying/pasting of images (or whatever). Whether the applications you use for that actually use the provided features of the X clipboard is another question, but they certainly could!
From the much-linked JWZ page: "One of the really cool, yet rarely used, features of the selection mechanism is that it can negotiate what data formats to use. It's not just about text. When one application asks another for the selection, part of their communication involves the requester asking the owner for the list of types in which they are capable of delivering the selection data; then the requester picks the format they like best, and asks for it that way."
For me anyway.. It's less steps I have to do when copying and pasting text.. So for me personally I find the ctrl-c,v,x thing annoying and get frustrated when some unix/linux app forces you to use that instaed of allowing the X-selection to copy text. But that's me personally..
And anyway all the new Desktop apps (gnome, kDE) allow for both the X-selection AND the ctrl-c,v,x system as the *standard*. It's only old apps that don't have the keyboard shortcuts.
X11's selection mechanism is marvelously efficient and it's a shame that other systems don't use it more. However, if you aren't used to it, it may be somewhat confusing to you and you may not take good advantage of it.
The selection mechanism is actually separate from the clipboard--it just is a way in which one application can communicate to another that it would like to get the data that is "currently selected" in that application. It's like dragging and dropping data between applications, only it's actually easier to do because you can rearrange windows in between.
The confusion really started when programmers coming from Macintosh and Windows only supported the cut-and-paste they knew and felt comfortable with. X11 has become less consistent because Macintosh and Windows developers tried to make it more consistent--with their understanding of the world.
In any case, there isn't much that can be done about it: X11 applications that ignore X11 conventions and mechanisms are now more common than correctly behaving ones. If you find yourself using the X11 selection mechanism accidentally, you can just remap it to something you are less likely to do; many applications that use selections will also have the good sense to use X11's traditional resource system.
Furthermore, there are a number of clipboard applications (e.g., xclipboard) that let you keep multiple clipboards and convert between selections and cut-and-paste.
Fortunately for you, unfortunately for traditional X11 users, X11 GUIs will probably sink to the lowest common denominator created by Windows and Macintosh. That way, the computing masses will be happy with their standardized, uniform, centrally planned user interface and all that unruly diversity will be quashed. The only difference will be whether windows are slightly transparent and where the menu bar goes, and people can endlessly debate the usability merits of the "Aqua" theme on Macintosh vs. the "XP" theme on Windows.
Well, no, not really. Here's how it really works.
I totally agree that too few Unix programs support the C-c/C-v idiom, but it's orthogonal to the select/middle-click idiom.
... the Microsoft Office clipboard.
It is probably the most retarded "innovation" to come out of Redmond, second only to multiple selections in Word. If you copy without pasting and then copy again, it stores the original clipboard in the "Office Clipboard." After you accumulate 20 or so of these, it will show a sidebar with all of the unpasted clipboards.
This even happens when you turn it off.
Made me think that the rule if you're drunk, always take the middle door holds for sober people in EXACTLY the same way...
Making this behaviour an option during startup.. EITHER ctl-c etc, OR mouse click would just make everyone happy.
On another note: In windows I can use quickedit mode and never have a problem with ctl-c ctl-v.... except for pasting to a cmd.exe window.
I hate using Windows because it lacks the Unix-style cut n'paste of text. It's so easy to work with. As a programmer it saves me a huge amount of time. I'd think the same would be true for anyone that works a lot with text. I just wish cutting and pasting other things in Unix was as easy. Gnome & KDE programmers should stop copying Windows and Mac methods and go with the easier Unix style. Highlight a file and the file is selected. Press the middle button and it's copied. Easy as can be. For more complex options you can still use the Windows-like right-click menus.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
> it will fail the "my mother" test
Well, since you mum wears combat boots and a mu-mu, I'm guessing you also an expert on fashion.
NYAH-NYAH-NA-NYAH-NYAH.
it will nuke the whole line in one fell swoop.
If you have time to post on slashdot you must be on top of the game. You obviously must be sitting back and watching as your computers all input records themselves and send you logs of what they are doing. You must have sysadmin down to an art where the computers do the work and you are merely the maestro ensuring they don't miss a beat.
Anyone here who has posted a slashdot gripe about cut and paste has a lot to be embarassed about. A whine about cut and paste is basically an admission that you are a data entry clerk and you are a slave to your computer. You are obviously being forced to cut an paste irrelevant data from one window to the next and it bothers you. You are obviously telling the computer to interactively transfer text/images from one part of a file to the next. That's repetition and the computer should do that itself unless you like sitting there doing repetitive tasks. No self respecting slashdotter should be in that category.
A real sysadmin writes good time and labour saving scripts and farms off any remaining minimal shitty file edits and updates to a structured task worker who will be content doing the minimal data entry.
Any senior analyst should only be cutting and pasting in project management applications or during documentation. Most of that is in microsoft anyways.
Automation though is key. These computers are getting faster and faster every year. With the plethora of scripting languages and the ever increasing power of desktop computers, there is no excuse for lack of automation and therefore little need for cut and paste. Those who have so much cutting and pasting are basically being mastered by the computer. We are in an era where the user should master the computer. Get the computer to do that boring cutting and pasting for you because your time is valuable. Learn macros, or scripts or find a way to accomplish your goals by getting the computer to do that tedious dogmatic nonsense for you.
Your time is valuable and it should not be spent on trying to create a support group on cut and paste woes. Let the computer worry about that while it processes the data for you in a well written script.
This is just another instance of a far more generic class of problem with Linux (and no, i don't mean an inability to coordinate developers ).
There is no one authority who can speak out and require that all the myriad little isolated or small development shops adhere to anything resembling a Human Interface Guideline, like Apples (or anyones).
If Linus or someone really came down firmly and consistently on the need to have some common standards (and not just for tcp / http / smtp or whatever), this situation might change. As things stand, though, I'm not going to hold my breath.
And before the flames begin - I love the IDEA of linux. Please! Really! Save me from Windows! I HATE Windows !!!
But I feel like someone on a surgery table about to die while a group of insane surgeons argue about which method to use to cut into me, while some start with a variety of implements without consulting the others, and no consensus being reached.
The problem is that the cure looks far scarier than the disease right now, and you can take that however you want.
And telling me to go out and become a developer isn't an answer, its a fricking cop-out. This isn't something you fix with a widget, its something you fix by acting like you care, and have a professional attitude.
There are linux conferences, linux journals, linux companies, linux-oriented scholars/scientists.
So, why not take all that and add the last ingredient needed to make linux development a profession? (i.e. professional conduct and attitude regarding the product ).
Hell, no one has to even starting thinking in human interface terms. No need to learn presentation skills or interface design!
APPLE ALREADY DID IT !
Is there anything preventing the linux community from just ADOPTING THE APPLE HIG as the defacto standard??
Besides petty NIH syndrome ? (Not Invented Here )Windows applications support drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste simultaneously. Does that confuse you, too? Does it bother you that you can't drag-and-drop something while also deleting the destination?
Well, X11's selection mechanisms doesn't, as you put it, perform an "automatic copy", it is actually separate from the copy-and-paste system, just like drag-and-drop is separate from copy-and-paste on Windows. X11's selection mechanism is a drag-and-drop operation, only that you can let go of the mouse button between selecting what you are going to drag and dropping it in the destination. It's actually significantly more convenient than drag-and-drop and significantly easier to handle. To make drag-and-drop work as well as X11's selection mechanism, you need to add weird hacks like "spring loaded containers".
Well-behaved X11 applications should implement both X11's selection mechanism and copy-and-paste. To convert between selections and clipboards, you can use any working X11 applications that can hold the datatype you are interested in converting, like an X11 text editor or the xclipboard application.
I use CLI and vi only you insenstive clod.
Errr...I don't use Linux (yes, mod me down to whatever u want and don't read on if you must) but why not make a system-wide change: left-click select puts the selection into the clipboard, selecting text with the right mouse button doesn't. Simple. This way the user can choose whether he wants to select-to-copy (left) or select-to-delete (right).
If it's already in the thread, sorry, I only searched the first page and didn't find my suggestion. So why didn't anyone think of this earlier? I don't see any disadvantages...
Only on slashdot. In the real world, saying this to a person would likely get you clocked in the face.
The Galeon browser is great with tabs. Set it up so that middle-click opens in a new tab...
- Middle-click the HOME icon to get a new tab.
- Middle-click an existing tab to open a duplicate.
- To do the "Open the selection in a new tab" thing, middle-click HOME then middle-click somewhere on the new window body.
Galeon also allows re-ordering tabs, closing a tab other than the one you're looking at (useful at work... think about it), and so forth.
I started as a windows user, and I'm very used to ctrl + c to copy and ctrl + v to paste.
This "Select to copy and middle button to paste" thing irritates me quite a bit, especially because I have a two button mouse (I would consider linux unusable if not for chordmiddle).
If you use mozilla/firefox, another nice tip is to use the plug-in diggler, it adds a cancel button beside the browser url location field. You can then just press it to clean the field, instead of selecting and pressing del, this way the selection won't go to the clipboard.
Free Software is not about choice. Free Software is about Free Software. Choice is incidental.
Also, choice isn't necessarily good.
The two copy-paste conventions are:
Windows/MAC:
1. Highlight selection with mouse
2. Ctl-c to copy selection to buffer
3. Click mouse at insertion point
4. Ctl-v to paste.
Unix/linux:
1. Highlight selection with mouse
2. Middle-click mouse at insertion point to paste
I have always had good success with the unix approach, and it seems simpler to me, too. I don't have to move my hand to the keyboard, for one. The work-around of keeping one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse doesn't really work for left-handed mouse users, because the c and v are on the left side of the keyboard.
Recently, I have been forced to deal with some Microsoft Office documents. I struggle even with the highlighting. As far as I can tell, there are some built-in "features" such as the impossibility of highlighting only part of a word at the beginning or end of the selection-- apparently, I don't know what I want to highlight, and MS Office decides for me to highlight the whole word. Another problem during highlighting is uncontrollably fast scrolling, so that I can easily highlight several pages by mistake.
Then, I have to move to the keyboard, hit ctl-c, move back to the mouse and click at the instertion point, move back to the keyboard and high ctl-v. That's inconvenient, to me.
That level of inconvenience assumes I remember to hit ctl-c. Given my unix background, more often than not, I forget to hit ctl-c, and I end up pasting into the document whatever happened to be in the buffer from before. And often, the highlighted selection is back on another workspace or under a lot of other windows, which makes it an additional inconvenience to go back and hit ctl-c.
I kept waiting for people to complain about this ctl-c/ctl-v user interface disaster. It severely disappoints me that people are actually complaining about the method that I find simpler and more intuitive.
Now ADTI report will include "detailed research" on the methods which Linux IP thieves use to steal proprietary source code. It is sad so many /.-ters got into this trap.
To everyone who complains about the way that X11/KDE/Gnome/etc handles cut-and-paste:
If you don't like it, you don't have to use it.
Windows users: Nobody forces you to use the middle button - it's a non-obvious feature for "power users". The way things are supposed to work is that CTRL-V and the middle mouse button are independent. Therefore you can choose to use only CTRL-C/CTRL-V and be perfectly happy. If your application confuses the two, submit a bug report, or barring that, fix it yourself. That's why it's open source.
Mac users: Miss your one-button mouse? Use one! If you're dedicated enough to want a crippled mouse, you should be able to figure out a way to remap your keyboard to get context menus to work like Mac OS.
Sheesh.
To the original poster: I feel your pain. Someone suggested using CTRL-K to clear the address bar, I'll have to try that. Otherwise, bugging application developers to fix broken impletementations seems the proper thing to do.
everything that this extension is already implemented in Opera for months, the undo closing page is in since version 7.20, it's around one year old.
I grew up with UNIX and X Windows and I find UNIX copy-paste to be just perfect. Frankly, you windows/mac users can go fuck yourselves if you don't like it.
learn to type? You would be surprised how fast you can go without looking at the keys once you learn how.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
1. Mark a selection
2. "Ctrl+C"
3. Mark another selection
4. "Delete"
5. Click somewhere
6. "Ctrl+V"
7. Enjoy pasting your first selection
I find your problem nonexistent.
I have exactly the opposite problem. I learned UNIX over 15 years ago (before DOS 3.3 was out). I'm so frustrated every time I'm forced to work on a Windows box that _doesn't_ do copy/paste as I've always learned (w/ the left button highlight, middle button paste) that I want to scream. I can't tell you how frustrating it is trying to get text copied and pasted in Windows.
My condolences that you had to learn first the wrong way. Unlearning bad habits is harder than learning it right the first time.
Perhaps, though, you can use KDE? They've been trying to be a Windows clone and have toasted copy and paste (at least how I'm used to doing it) in most KDE apps.
"What I am saying is that many people don't understand why highlighting something would copy it."
As I understand the way UNIX works is:
Left-Drag: Select text.
Middle-Click: Copy(Paste) current selection here.
BTW. I don't understand what you mean by "Middle click required to copy text". If you mean copy as in "copy to clipboard" then what button would we use to paste?
"Oh but linux users have freedom of choice" <Sarcasm>Which is why it's overtaken both macintosh and windows platforms right?</Sarcasm> Until a set of desktop standards is announced, and a GUI is built to use this standard, linux will never be mainstream (think it is now? think again, most desktop linux users are either geeks, or using workstations at work) Flame away...
(hell, the paradigm discussed predates LINUX!!) I had the other problem when switching from SGI machines to windows boxes (back in the day, 1990 or so, although going from vi + tex to a "wysiwyg" word processor on windows 3.1 didnt seem useful at the time, I couldn't understand why the management was buying these silly home computers for work, lol; clearly *NOT* clairvoyant, me).
Whilst in windows I tend to use shift-del and shift-ins; I *miss* the middle mouse button paste behaviour, especially with good "double click" rules for word/phrase selection.
Both paradigms are pretty basic tho; if you *need* a "clipboard" in *nix, keep a text editor open and when you highlight to copy, paste it in the text editor and continue editing... when you want to copy back, double click the text in the text editor and paste away...
err!
jak
Don't be such a pussy!
The GUI is only to be used to browse the web, and you can't highlight and delete in the terminal.
I prefer the X-Windows select to copy and middle-mouse button to paste scheme because I don't have to type anything to copy and paste.
My question is if and how this can be done on WindowsXP?
No matter what mechanism is used to accessing the clipboard, unless it supports multiple things then you will always find yourself clobbering something you want to keep. It happens in X, it happens in windows.
So, use a handy clipboard history tool - like wmcliphist. This tool will cache a user defined number of clipboard contents which are available from a context menu over the dockapp. You can lock items which prevents them from being overwritten, and even sort strings into sub directories based on regular expressions (web shortcuts in one, email addresses in another, etc.).
Some people have also mentioned klipper which I think does a similar job.
I've been searching for a Windows util that forces a mimic of the highlight/copy -n- click/paste functionality of the *nix workstations. Is there any available (other than puTTy intra-app)? Someone want to write one? :)
./er and dont read deep into the comments.
Please email URLs/code/utils to chillburgh(at)netscape.net as I admit that I'm a surface
The actual habit of selecting text for the purpose of deleting it withers with time.
The only place it gets you is urls, and that's easily solvable once you get in the habit of pressing ctrl+u which wipes out the url line in Mozilla/firebird.
The only annoying thing then is using Mozilla/firebird on windows where you'll press ctrl+u and it brings up the damn source in it's annoying non-editable fashion.
Private rant, why does mozilla and other mozilla based browsers insist on opening the source in a read only window instead of a text editor? Even if they need to include a simple text editor with mozilla it'd be tiny compared to the app as is.
If you use composer or another graphical environment for writting webpages (ie, not a serious web developer/designer) that doesn't help, you still have to hit "edit this page" in the menu to get up composer. If you edit html source properly by hand in a text editor, it is VERY helpful to right-click, view source, save and then reload on a local html file to see changes every 15 seconds or so. Doing things this way gives you a visual experience equal or superior to graphical apps and html which is VASTLY superior.
I have solved the problem in Emacs with a customization package: it defines Apple-C and Apple-V, because I found it too annoying on my Mac. It also doesn't put marked text automatically into the clipboard (or whatever the emacs folks call it: kill-ring). you can get a package here.
> Using a mouse in unix? That's heresy.
Yes, being a guinea pig is more appropriate.;-)
esc-yy to yank a line
esc-ctrl-v to block highlight with a single y to yank
esc-p to paste
Pure, simple, clean, effective. Totally avoids "middle clicking" (Mac Friendly!).
Sorry if I missed anyone who said this already, but...
You can start selecting text and press or before letting go of the button and that text will not be copied and overwrite what you currently have in the clipboard. I do this all the time. Try it!
He died for you, won't you live for Him?
So I've been using Linux for years now, and I had NO IDEA about the automatic copying. All this time, I just assumed the clipboard didn't work in all apps -- and it's just been pasting exactly what I'd just highlighted back onto itself.
I guess things aren't always as obvious as you'd think.
Might work, though I think I'd need to code it up and try it to decide how it felt - might be "too easy" to do accidentally (btw, don't hold your breath waiting for me to code it, I've got lots of other less fun things to do...).
I also know some applications use middle-button drag for x-y scrolling/panning, which I also like, as the scroll bars are sooo far away on my desktop and I don't have one of those newfangled 2-axis x-y new-mouse-wheel thingies - but that's not a long-term problem, I suppose, as Microsoft will eventually have pretty much everyone with the 2-axis new-mouse-wheel thingy.
Actually, thinking about it, I'm not entirely sure there's any easy protocol for a "swap" within the X selection framework in the two independent applications case (how to tell App1 that it needs to get data when "swap" is requested in App2 ???. It's easier to make an "fast replace" of PRIMARY in App2 from App1's SECONDARY as App1 doesn't need to know to get new data from App2, but that's a bit different from what I originally had in mind and doesn't buy much over ctrl-x/c/v IMHO).
I will have to meditate upon it further, it's 1am here at the moment and I'm not at my best...
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Single- or double-tapping F6 in Windows will select the address bar (but not copy it) in Firefox. Wait...did I just admit I used windows?
Opera solves this problem by allowing you to middle click ANYWHERE (except other URLs) on the browser window and it will open a new tab with the new url thats in clipboard
what annoys me is for whatever reason x seams to clear the clipboard automaticall when you exit an app. Like if i copy a URL out of Firefox, close Firefox, and try to paste that URL into Gaim the clipboard is empty. This may not be that big of a deal if you are used to it, but I for one hate clutter and close things the instant I am done with them. Which can be very annoying if it loses what you had in the clipboard (unlike Windows).
Maybe their is a way around this. I can be a *nix noob at times...
Matt
You have 1 Moderator Point! Use it or lose it! Is that a threat? -vapid
The lack of a common, robust and flexible copy/paste system under Linux is one of the things that has driven me back to Windows several times. I can't even always get text copy/paste to work between different apps, and forget images, objects, cutting a table from a web page and pasting into a spreadsheet and expecting proper behavior, etc.
Between that and getting printing working in a reasonable fashion (IE not having to install 12 pseudo printers if I want to print 12 different ways, or figuring out CUPS, or whatever) are the things that keep driving me nuts and sending me back to Micro$oft.
lol, this is just an idea lol...but; who said you have to have a set number of clipboards? A linked list fasion like in c++ would do great letting you just keep adding another board when you need to:) the next time you control-c it would add another board and copy it:) ..well if needed
First 2 shell scripts:
.bbkeysrc:
$ cat xcopy
#!/bin/sh
xclip -o -selection primary | xclip -selection clipboard
$ cat xpaste
#!/bin/sh
xclip -o -selection clipboard | xclip -selection primary
Then using your favorite keymapper set these to something close (M-c/M-v in my case). Here's an excerpt from my
KeyToGrab(c), WithModifier(Mod1), WithAction(ExecCommand), DoThis(~/bin/xcopy)
KeyToGrab(v), WithModifier(Mod1), WithAction(ExecCommand), DoThis(~/bin/xpaste)
Now alt-c copies highlighted text to the clipboard. Then alt-v copies the clipboard to the primary selection (so middle click them pastes it).
Note that many programs that support C-c/C-v use X's clipboard selection. That means you can hit C-c in say firefox, them hit C-v, then middle click into an xterm and get the text you copied from firefox.
Hope this helps.
"It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Albert Camus
Use windows, its better anyway =)
That link to the article on freedesktop.org is the only piece of the information in this discussion really worth reading. Thanks :)
[ UNSIGNED NOT NULL ]
I've been using X since about 1992, and since early on have found that select-middle click copy and paste method is much nicer than any other. I find that it makes it that little bit easier to copy and paste, and so I end up using it a lot more, when on a Mac or Windows I'd continue typing for smallish amounts of text.
I think the mouse button based copy and paste is a more intuitive concept, especially if you describe the content to a user as metaphorically 'being in the mouse'; with ctrl-c ctrl-v the metaphor isn't as clear (to me anyway).
I've always found the mouse copy to be one of the features that brings me back to a unix desktop time and again - no-where else has that level of ease with copy & paste.
What's irritating me is that the new desktops are starting to break things that made the mouse buffer useful. Ctrl-U, since the Dawn of Time*, has meant 'clear text to start of line', which makes pasting in URLs to browsers work properly. It seems the latest Gnome releases have broken it, and now I find random things happening in my applications (like View Source on a web page) when I want to paste a URL. Only a powerful and abiding laziness has stopped me from rolling back to an earlier gnome release.
- Daniel
* for small values of 'The Dawn of Time'
If you are a dubmass who likes running trojans you can put . in your path. It is of course not recomended. Now, if you understand why it is a good thing to have to conciously run a script or program located in your current working directory the two extra charecters are a non-issue, and don't realy slow you down that much.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
Who the hell is moderating this shit? 99% of the posters have it 100% wrong. Fucking Christ, if noone knew about the highlight / middle mouse-button selection mechanism, everyone would just use copy/paste just like on Windows and noone would notice any difference.
There are real *problems with X and X applications, but so far everyone has been way-the-hell off-base.
* Eg. I can't think of any two programs that can copy/paste graphics between each other.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
That's why ALL major unix text editors are crap and hang years behind DOS tools - where you could simply select text with shift+arrow keys. Right now even such "user friendly" Unix editors like 'joe' require at least a dozen keys ONLY to select text (Ctrl+K+B
Unless kernel developers change the default keymap, or at least some of the major distros standardize on it, Linux consoles and text editors remain unusable crap.
I wish there was a "freeconsole" project, that tried to enhance general Linux utility useability as "freedesktop" already does for X11.
that doesn't require an entire topic on Slashdot.
Geez a true power user would just adapt - like me. I use both every day and can more or less adapt transparently even when running Unix apps on my Windows desktop.
However.... I ALWAYS type "setenv env_var val" instead of "set env_var=val" in the Windows shell - which drives me nutz!!! But that is my one transgression.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
There is an option that works well in both win32 and *nix. I have adopted it just for the very same reason it frustrates the hell out of me when I type ls in win32 and dir on solaris.
Hey, cool, it works in Linux too. Ctrl-L works in Windows as well, though it's less relevant because it wouldn't copy it to the clipboard anyway.
You know what I hate? Wait, what do you like? I hate that!
You might be able to bind a key or mouse button in your window manager to run it.
XSel
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Actually, thinking about it, I'm not entirely sure there's any easy protocol for a "swap" within the X selection framework in the two independent applications case (how to tell App1 that it needs to get data when "swap" is requested in App2 ???.
:-).
Hm. Should have actually reread the effing ICCCM Spec before posting that. I'm actually covering old ground, so my "idea" is not very new at all anyway...). The thing in my suggestion not already in the ICCCM spec I think is that applications should grab secondary corresponding to their old primary on losing primary. Anyway, reading the ICCCM Spec I kinda get the impression that they had some idea of SECONDARY being a bit more independent than that, maybe like ordinary left-drag => highlight in blue => PRIMARY, right-drag => highlight in orange => SECONDARY, or something.
Still, maybe the temporally ordered PRIMARY-to-SECONDARY transition I suggested would be less confusing than two completely separate highlights. Or not. Have to code _both_ and try them
I'm _really_ going to bed now...
ICCCM excerpts:
2.6.1.2 The SECONDARY Selection
The selection named by the atom SECONDARY is used:
o As the second argument to commands taking two arguments (for example, "exchange primary and secondary selections")
o As a means of obtaining data when there is a primary selection and the user does not want to disturb it.
2.6.3 Selection Targets with Side Effects
These side-effect targets are used to implement operations such as "exchange PRIMARY and SECONDARY selections".
2.6.3.2 INSERT_SELECTION
The owner should use the selection mechanism to convert the named selection into the named target and should insert it at the location of the selection for which it got the INSERT_SELECTION request.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Generally speaking, these still work. I got used to them and still use them regularly today in virtually all Windows applications.
By the way, Cut is Shift-Delete
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
DOS even had a GUI. ;) So I'm not sure that the Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V can even be considered a "standard".
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
I'm finding this discussion almost unbelievable!
Except for broken applications, there is no conflict between the primary selection and clipboard mechanisms. You can completely ignore middle-click and happily use only the clipboard. Almost all modern apps implement Ctrl-X/C/V; some older ones implement Ctrl-Insert/Delete because that was the standard in earlier versions of Motif (it came from the CUA standard ---> IBM Presentation Manager ---> Motif 1.0).
So you can look at Select+MiddleClick as an optional addition to the user interface. Don't care for it? Just use the clipboard!
But let's not work ourselves into a sweat and start ripping the primary selection code out of the GUI toolkits. Primary selection is a good thing: it works where clipboard selection doesn't (for example, where a selection is permitted but no Copy function is available), it takes advantage of the hardware (let's use those middle buttons!), and it's a legitimate timesaver for many of us.
(But to whoever made the earlier versions of KDE operate on the primary selection when Ctrl-X/C/V was used: we sentence you to read the Inter-Client Communication Convention Manual (ICCCM) from the X Window System from Cover to Cover, three times. In 8-point Courier. On red paper).
Not exactly on the point of copy-paste, but I'd like to know who the fscking idiot concieved of drag-n-drop for text and implemented it? Lately I've increasingly often been frustrated by trying to remove/copy/select a piece of a URL, for instance. If I accidentally select too much/too little, I instinctively start to select the correct region. Then I notice that instead of selecting the new part it has drag-dropped the selected text somewhere else! How this can be called a 'feature' (especially in text-entries such as the URL bar) I can't understand.
The only place I can possibly concieve this being useful would be in word processing, eg. selecting a paragraph and drag-dropping it to another place, but this is exactly what copy-paste is for. Copy-paste is so simple that there doesn't need to be another way to do it. Definately not such an irritating way as drag-and-drop!
I doubt, therefore I may be.
As a Unix - Linux etc.. guy the lack of a middle button paste and the stupid control keys drive me nuts with the windows world view.
- Ctrl+C already means something very common and specific (send a SIGINT) in console windows, so the standard Windows-style keybindings cannot be used in console windows. This is a historical clash between the Unix/DOS "Ctrl+C interrupts" and the Windows/OS2 "Ctrl+C copies" (on the Mac the convention is actually Command-C, so Ctrl is still available, and OS X's Terminal uses it as you'd expect) - Windows' MS-DOS-derived command prompt has the same conflict and a similar solution.
this is one of the reasons I use the combos listed in subject line instead of ^C, ^X, and ^V when I'm not using auto copy and middle mouse. (the other reason being that ^C,^X, and ^V don't make that much sense on a dvorak layout, where they're spread all around the keyboard)
^X = shift+delete (it's the only one with del; it cuts)
^C = ctrl+insert (you're controlling what will later be inserted. copy)
^V = shift+insert (paste)
I've used these since way back when I was running OS/2, before I was aquainted with *nix's autocopy. I still use them now when I run into problems with Gnome and KDE apps not wanting to play nice with each other's (or their own) clipboards with autocopy (or when I'm using windows with it's annoying lack of automatic copying.)
(having said all that, I still agree with others who say that klipper and its ilk are awesome and much needed tools)
I've read Grocklaw. BoycottNovell, you're no Grocklaw
The author of the writeup has recieved plenty of advice to "get used to it" and plenty of explanations as to why things are the way they are, but no real answer...
I sympothise with him because I was in the same shoes. Having developed on Suns every weekday of the past year got me used to the X way of copy/paste but the problem remains, and I sometimes mess up:
Very common problem is selecting text and accidentally moving the mouse down a little bit so that the whole line is selected, including the line break. This means that when I paste onto the command line (which is where I usually paste into) the line break will get pasted too and submit whatever was pasted to the shell for execution, whether this is what you want or not. It's also common that I select text, then in the process of positioning my cursor where I want the text pasted, I select a bit of text, losing the original selection.
I would assume that a nice Linux distro could package software that mainly supports the Windows-style copy/paste to aleviate this problem somewhat. No such luck in my work environment (but I mainly use the shell and emacs so it's livable)
My big issue with Linux copy/paste is that it's stupid when it comes to... well, here's an example. I have a Word document with tons of formating. I copy it, paste it into something that only supports plain text. No problem. Formatting is stripped, text remains. I could NOT get this to happen with OpenOffice and Mozilla. Whatever magic Microsoft does to "downcast" your selection to whatever the app you're pasting into can handle, is a blessing.
Also....
Sometimes when I use Windows (which I do at home) I end up selecting some text and not doing control-c or right-click/copy and expecting it to be pasted later on. Of course it doesn't. I was looking for a third party app that would simulate the X way of copy/paste on Windows but never found one (I mean, things like mIRC support this internaly, I want to find something that will make it work in all apps - but no such luck.) BLAH. I just pressed control-e to get to the end of the line and Composer opened.... Any way to get emacs keys to work in Windows Mozilla? I believe they work in Linux Mozilla...
The best I've found were a couple of apps that keep your clipboard history (Microsoft Office does this when you have one of the Office apps open) which is sometimes handy when you need to paste say 10 separate things from one app into another. You go to app #1, select text1, copy, select text2, copy, etc, then go to app #2 and paste, then past history item #1, history item #2 etc. No need to switch context 10 times.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
Sidenote: in Internet Explorer, CTRL+L brings up the "Open Page" dialog and gives focus to the URL field. You can paste in a URL and press enter.
So this trick is cross browser.
Also, AlT+D in IE does the same thing as CTRL+L in Mozilla.
You know what, I can't stand those stupid WordStar shortcuts. Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V have well-defined meanings in a lot of apps; Ctrl+C pretty much everywhere. Like Ctrl+Z -- suspend or undo?
You know, I don't much care about Windows. I prefer UNIX, because its what I'm used to, but when I use Windows, I don't sit there and whine because it doesn't copy the way I'm used to. I recognize that I'm using a different OS and that its paradigms are different. Windows has essentially always used the Ctrl+C Ctrl+V stuff it ripped off from the Mac. In the old days, MS used Ctrl+Insert and friends because in DOS Ctrl+C was the same as Ctrl+Break, usually.
I appreciate that people want Linux to overtake Windows, but this does not mean doing everything the way Windows/Mac does. Windows and Mac are both different and yet successful. Why must Linux copy either? I like it just fine the way it is, thank you very much, and I would be royally pissed off if some newbie Linux user pining for their Windows/Mac way went and redefined the system I've been using since the 80s, just to suit them. As I imagine they would be if I unilaterally imposed X clipboard semantics onto their OSs.
The X clipboard does have issues. It isn't properly internationalized, for one, so you can never be sure if non-ascii text will copy properly, but this is more because of a lack of standard than anything else, and the people at fdo.org and such are working on such extensions (which weren't necessary back when all this was designed.) But this is a function of its implementation, not its UI. News flash: today, Windows and Mac do not have good UIs in the scientific sense. The original Mac may have, relatively speaking, but with the introduction of skinning, custom icons, etc, etc, it's all gone way down hill. But people still like it and use it. They just have a learning curve. Sheesh!
I suggest the following: abandon the use of Ctrl entirely for menu shortcuts in GNOME and KDE, and instead use the Windows key. We don't use it in Linux anyway. On Macs, we can use the Cmd key, just like they do; on Sparcs, Meta; etc. That way Ctrl and Alt can still be used for what they were intended. Emacs keys and sending signals to programs. I wan't to be able to give a window focus and type Ctrl-C, fuck this xkill shit. Or Ctrl-Z, for that matter. Some WMs let you do this (mine does, thank god). But for menu and widget based stuff it needs to be standardized.
Oh, oh! We could even make it so that Windows users can set Ctrl to behave like the windows key, if they wanted! But the rest of us, who understand that Ctrl and Meta/Cmd/Super/Ultra/Whatever are different keys, we can get on with our lives and be productive.
Windows UI is Windows UI. UNIX has its own way. It is not inferior, just different. Notice I'm not dogging on Windows here.
I have my F5 key defined to this:
xclip -o | xargs -iMYCLIP firefox \
-remote "openURL(MYCLIP,new-window)"
Pops up a new window with the selected URL. If you select a whole bunch of URLs, it opens them all in different windows.
The really weird thing is that a slashdot search of freedesktop returns no hits at all. You would think with all the standardization stuff these guys are working on, they'd be getting metion all the time.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
When I am entering text into a form like this and I want to insert something at the begnning of the line. No problem, I'll just hit ^A and start... Wait, I'm not in Emacs, I just trashed my whole post. AAHHHHHH!
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
We don't deal with it. We drop $129 on OSx where real interface and design people are paid good money to ensure things work. That's one of the reasons I switched 3 years ago. I was tired of working with my computer rather than getting work done on it.
Once OS devs stop building little islands of useability, this may change. If not, Linux will go the way of Novell.. powerful and efficient, but an infentesimal market share.
Yeah, did anyone ever notice how annoying it is in GAIM.
You can't copy IM conversations to any other window, you select it, and it does nothing.
You ought' to think the gAIM developers(http://gaim.sourceforge.net) would impliment a feature that has been in operating systems since OS/2 and Mac OS 1.4
Alas, it doesn't appear so though. You can't copy things in to the "chat" box neither IIRC.
I do know for certain you can't copy stuff out of the "conversation" part of the window, and it's annoying.
Wait...did I just admit I used windows?
Yes, you did. Fool.
I actually really LIKE the middle button paste. I find it tremendously speeds up common tasks.
My only problem is, I wish Mac OS X and Windows implemented the middle click buffer. Anyone know of such efforts?
My idea: have applications make use of SECONDARY.
Highlight -- copies into PRIMARY.
Highlight again -- moves into SECONDARY, and new highlight is in PRIMARY
Middle click to paste -- if it's in the middle of primary, delete and paste secondary. If not, paste primary there.
Efficient, and works like it should already.
I highlight->middle mouse button in windows all the time, forgetting that I'm in windows. It really annoys me, because I have to go back to my selection, press ctrl-c, then go back to the browser and highlight the url and press ctrl-v.
Also, using a terminal with highlight/middle mouse button is awesome. like if I see a directory path I want to go to I type cd, then double click the path to highlight it (in Konsole), then middle mouse button. No futzing around with weird shift->insert or whatever keys.
Leave the clipboard how it is. Just get the toolkits to agree on common data-type standards (yes you *CAN* copy and paste images and things between programs that understand the data type. We just need to grow the list of datatypes and get the toolkits to support em).
Which I guess illustrates part of the problem - if you have to have a clue about the selection buffers it's probably not an optimal design for average users.
Eg. I can't think of any two programs that can copy/paste graphics between each other.
So it doesn't work like Windows then. Windows CTRL+C/V or right click Copy & Paste works on graphics as well as text in Windows.
I've been using linux since 1.2.13 and I find the copy paste method to be 100% accurate to how I expect the behavior to occur. I find the opposite scenario to be frustrating -- logging into a windows or cyrus on windows machine and dealing with their draconian cut & patste one hand on the mouse, the other on the keyboard, carpal tunnel syndrome inducing method to be ... lacking.
If any linux/unix developers are reading this, please don't change linux to match some assinine OS like windows.
Ctrl+Insert : copy
Shift+Insert: paste
the only true cut and paste is the above methods; which cause windows to perform a copy/paste, whereas ctrl+c and v are the software programmed cut/paste. you can copy text out of a non-copy textbox with ctrl+insert. sukka dog.
Going back to windows is by far the most annoying result thing after getting used to the highlight + middle click.
I constantly try and paste with a middle-click to no avail.
After much frustration, I finally realize I'm in windows!
If there is one thing I have to explain to every person who attempts to use one of my linux machines, it is how to copy and paste. Unfortunately, this is something that has never really worked in a uniform manner for as long as I've been using linux. Some applications won't let you highlight. Some applications will allow you to highlight, but contain no context menu that allows you to copy. Some applications will permit CTRL-C, but not a context menu. Yet other applications, if you are really clever and continue to HOLD your highlighted text with your left mouse button still depressed, you can do a quick CTRL-C with the other hand. But be careful about closing that application you just had open when you highlighted and copied that text. You might have just lost your "clipboard" contents if you did close it... Then there is pasting. The whole gamut of problems which plague copying also apply to pasting. Some applications simply don't know how to accept pasted information. Others will allow you to paste, but you have to figure out their preferred method -- CTRL-V OR right-click, or perhaps they only let you do it from the "edit" menu.
:-) Anyone have any real solutions to this problem? Solutions that ALL applications can agree on? Probably not, else we would have one by now...
In all the time I've been using linux applications, this problem has existed. It has gotten better with time, as more standard toolkits are used to develop applications, but the underlying problem is still there and is an absolute CERTAIN stumbling block for new users. They ALWAYS have trouble with the clipboard and quite frankly, don't have the patience many times to try and work around it.
And just to stoke the flames a bit, the clipboard ALWAYS works in Windows and it ALWAYS works exactly the same way and it isn't dependent on any single application being open to store the clipboard data. Such simple things that Windows users do all day every day, such as copying the contents of a word document into notepad to kill all formatting, then copying it back into say a web editor is a task that is typically awkward to attempt in linux applications. And the damn clipboard has worked perfectly in Windows since Windows '95.
WHY can't the clipboard problem be fixed? Why hasn't the clipboard problem been fixed by now? Good grief, I know I am not the only person who has this problem on an HOURLY basis when trying to get ACTUAL work done. There needs to be ONE clipboard mechanism that is useable UNIVERSALLY by all applications. It is such an important thing to get right because it affects so much. And the old highlight it and it is copied crap is just that. It needs to die. That is too much to assume about the user's intention in making a highlight.
Ok, that feels better to get that off my chest.
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
In vim, you can disable the middle mouse button (by making it act like the left button) with:
map <MiddleMouse> <LeftMouse>
map <2-MiddleMouse> <2-LeftMouse>
There is the gnome clipboard deamon that stores your selections in a stack / list. I don't know how widely it's used atm.
The Klipboard feature helps solve this very problem (though it may have other functions as well). Just have it always running on your KDE bar and this problem is mostly solved. All I have to do is go to the Klipboard and select what I want to paste. You may ask "Isn't it the same as copying again?" but it isn't. It is much easier and you could have closed the app from which you copied the text...
Well you mastered this wonderful feature of UNIX which I find much more intuitive than silly key combinations like on the Mac or under Windows.
However I have to admit that I noticed the same behaviour as you regarding the deletion of selected text. I assume this is because I'm forced to use Windows at work (disgusting). The best solution would be to abolish Windows entirely . Since this is not possible I think I have to use my brain before copying more often. Remember first delete then copy. You could even do that under Windows. Clearly this would never happen if I used Linux more frequently than Windows. Such a shame!
Always remember: its Windows fault not UNIXes.
Well If you want something in between you can always select then point the cursor into the URL bar delete the URL by hand and paste the selection. How is that?
Get a scroll mouse!
Um, I'm a student. What money do you propose I pay for this mouse with?
(How do you switch weapons in UT2k4 without it?)
Assuming you're referring to "Unreal Tournament," I don't own it and have never played it. I just want to ctrl+c a URL and paste it in the address bar without it deciding to copy the address already in the bar, thus undoing the copy!
What a sob story..from an ex windows user of course. GET OVER IT. Stop trying to make linux behave like windows. I find the standard copy and paste functions of X very quick and precise.
Sorry, didn't preview. Change about:prefs to about:config in the parent -srcosmo
My wife used to write marketing copy for BRIEF, after it was bought by The Programmers Shop, and before TPG went bust. A relatively brief interval, actually.
well buddy you have two options. They are commonally called the Backspace -------- key and the Delete key. Holding these down will rapidly erase text. It's a novel idea, one that i'm sure will loose itself in the hussle of the world today. Also in most BIOSs there you may have an opprotunity to set the repeat speed of you keys on your keyboard. Thus increasing the speed of your deleting. (GNOME 2.6 also has this functionality)
:)
Good luck on learning these new keys.
Your mother is a dumbass. I don't give a shit about dumbasses, let them bleed Windows dry with stupid ass support calls.
My fucking 7 year old brother picked it up, even after learning how to use Windows first.
It's not rocket science, even your Mother had to learn at one point not to hold the mouse upside down.
OMG! USABILITY ISSUE! She should be able to use the mouse EVEN IF IT IS UPSIDE DOWN.
Because she should never have to learn how to use a computer to use a computer.
That's why MICE WILL NEVER BECOME MAINSTREAM.
Those hardware makers sure are arrogant SOBS. Mouse that doesn't work upside down, pfttt... Keyboards type just fine upside down, but a mouse is all reversed and shit.
This is unbelievable. As Chevy Chase said, "You're all fucked in the head."
I love the X-style copy/paste mechanism. It's so smooth and simple. If I highlight something from any source, I want it to always be ready to paste next. That's a brilliant idea. Why do I have to use the QWERTY-specific, claw-stroke to do the obvious thing? I've already got my hand on the mouse; some mouse action ought to paste my selection.
This is just unreal. People always complain here that Linux isn't as easy to use as cheeze-wiz, and now you want to "standardize" on some (other) arbitrary action or key combo!?
THIS is what draw's out the Linux zelots. You learned how to do this somewhere else and then, when picking up a system you know to be completely different, and deliberatly so, you not only expect it to work the same in every way, but you don't realize that someone else thought of this before you and decided to do it differently for, what could be, a really good reason.
Fine. I think it's better this way. So there; now what? Happy? Does that satisfy you? I think you should learn X and like it. But, you think differently, of course. Isn't life grand?
I learned on MS Windows, too. And I love X-Windows; especially this feature. So, face the fact that there's no way to make everyone happy. There is no perfectly intuitive interface. Get over yourself. Try to image what it would be like to start over, without having to fit the world to your hammer. You might like it. Or you might not. That's the promise here. Not that you will like it, but only that what you like is possible.
I hope you find happiness...somewhere else.
I've come to find that unix-style copies are quite nice when coupled with emacs editing keys. in the example of wanting to paste a url to a browser, i would click the url box, ctrl-a, ctrl-k, and middle click to paste.
for reference, ctrl-a = cursor to beginning of line, ctrl-k = kill text after cursor
unfortunate for me, many newer applications and revisions of libraries have abandoned support for emacs-style editing. for these applications i keep open any simple text application that has good support for copy-paste.
too lazy to create an account right now -- Tyln
mozilla and some other apps still honor at least ^U to delete backwards from the cursor,^k for forwards. Too bad all apps don't reserve a handful of the more sacred keyboard shrtcts.
For more complicated cut'n'paste operations I find xclipboard useful.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
Why would your mother want to use a compiler? She probably wouldn't. But would you suggest we get rid of compilers too?
Why not just let your mother not use a compiler, and let her stick to Ctrl-X/C/V like she is used to, and never bother her with learning programming and select/middle-click? It's not like she is forced to use it.
A righthander could use CTRL-`
Jaap
I really don't see the problem. I use Linux for a long time now and I really love the mouse-selects-middle-pasts... this is a feature, not a bug! There are problems, yes, like the "clipboard" will be emtied when the window closes, this IS bad. but everything besides this is very handy. >> As in, I'll highlight text to copy it, then >> realize I want to highlight a block of text for >> the purpose of deleting it. Of course, the >> second highlighting overwrites the first >> highlighting. This is nonsense... if you want to past the whole text, just do it and delete wahtever you like in the source text after that. if you realize you don't want something pasted then deleting it after the paste in the new document is easier anyway. scenario 3: you have selected some text and realize you want to delete a section of it also in the original (before the copy&past)... First this is your problem (you should have done before) but just cont the clicks: UNIX: select text, deselect text, select text to delete, delete, select text to copy, paste WINDOWS: select text, copy, deselect text, select text to delete, delete, select text to copy, copy, paste So this is actually easier on *x...
There is an addon for firefox called "Paste and Go" which does exactly what you describe. I have no idea how well this works on *nix but its sweet on win32.
Note that I'm stating that unix User Interfaces tend to be less modular and NOT unix OS design in general, which can be very modular and clean.
The problem is that highlight/middle-click muddles and hinders the modular combination of logically simple and orthogonal commands to form more complex commands. i.e. By performing two actions upon highlighting (select AND copy), we cannot build an operation which "selects" without "copying" using this technique. As the author of this article observes, this greatly limits what you can do between performing a "copy" and performing a "paste"; namely, you cannot select anything else.
In a more modular system, highlighting serves a single purpose: selection. Subsequently, another command may be given to perform some operation on that selection. In this way we can combine a few simple and logically orthogonal commands to build a more complex command.
In fact, this is my complaint with the UI of *nix programs in general (e.g. text editors). Rather than logically and modularly combining a few simple orthogonal operations, a multitude of distinct key sequences are used. e.g. with CUA (Windows) keybindings, you have the navigation keys (arrows, home, end, pgup, etc.). Adding ctrl to the left and right arrows moves by words. On top of these navigation keys, adding shift causes selection of the text you navigate. Each addition has a clear and logical role in modularly forming the compound command. Selecting a line is as simple as Home, Shift+Down. Copying to the Clipboard does not impede any subsequent editing; the Clipboard is a logically separate entity.
Of course, additional macros can certainly be created which bind to any mouse and key presses in order to improve user efficiency, but these should exist on top of a simple, logical, and modular UI for combining commands. Hence, you are welcome to X's highlight/middle-click, but it is very important that there also be a logically separate Clipboard with explicit copy and paste commands for modularly creating compound commands.
This is why CUA (Windows) keybindings and style of editing are infiltrating the unix UI; because they are more modular and simple.
X actually has different ways to handle cut/copy and paste.
The method you mentioned is the one most used and supported in almost all X application is called the primary selection. (There is also a secondary selection, but the only application i know that supports it is Nedit)
X also has a feature called cutbuffers. Which is buffers of text stored in the x server. (Regarding the primary selection, the x server only remembers which window has it... the application running has to respond to events from other applications wishing to read it.)
For applications that do not support CTRL-C/V, you can run xcutsel. Xcutsel is an ugly X app with three buttons that allows you to copy the contents of the primary selection to cutbuffer 0 and select the contents of cutbuffer 0 for pasting with the middle mouse button.
And apparently CTRL-C/V is implemented in a whole 3rd way... hmmm... maybe X is sometimes too flexible for its own good
I use this mostly when running a VNC client on windows on a linux VNC server for copying text back and forth between windows and the X applications, as VNC places what you copy in windows into cutbuffer 0 and not the current selection.
Hope this helps....
X-Windows is the first window environment I worked with where copy/paste works the X-way.
Then for me came MacOS 5.x ( <APP>Z, <APP>X, <APP>C and <APP>V ). MS Windows basically copied the MacOS behavior but with the <APP> key missing on the AT keyboard, the <APP> was replaced by ^ (Control). Now how am I supposed to differ between an interrupt signal and a copy command? Sure, shift-insert etc... Bugger!
Most of the time (say 99% of the cases) I intend the selection to be put into the copy buffer and I want to paste it somewhere else. I hate having to do ^C and ^V on MS Windows and love the selection/middle button from X-Windows.
In fact, I find the MS Windows user interface the prohibitive factor in being productive on MS Windows. Just watch me writing code on xterm/vi!
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Cmd-L works in Safari too (as you might expect, since it and Konqueror are practically identical at times).
"This is why men never share their feelings; because women always remember." -Just Shoot Me.
given 3 buttons and a nice file interface/editor* it is possible to copy and paste very fast. mouse chords takes away the time consuming ''let go of the mouse and find the keyboard'' part of copying, without having to spend time with opening and searching menus.
* wily http://www.cs.yorku.ca/~oz/wily,
acme http://swtch.com/plan9port
bengt
Just click the cursor at the end of the url/string that you want to get rid of, hit ctrl+u, and then paste as normal. Note that ctrl+u erases to the beginning of the line, ^, whereas you can then paste that text back with ctrl+y
Get some skills, mandrake boy.
With plan9 you can select text to be run when you release the button, ie:
Press button 3 to highlite text. When you let go, what's highlited get's immidietly run in rc (the terminal). No need to press enter or anything...
That WM is crazy.
But on my system (Gentoo PPC on a 333mhz iMac), Ctrl-C has it's own 'clipboard' and highlight has it's own clipboard, so if I highlight one thing, press CTRL-C, then highlight something else- then go to another program and press CTRL-V and then Middel click, I will get two completely seperate peices of text- and once I got used to the 'two clipboard' system, it was actaully something interesting, I've found a couple specialized applications for it.
Back to the point however, on my system at least CTRL-C highlight what I want to write over CTRL-V, works, in every X application I have. So maby the problem is not you, but your distrobution; try another one?
That is, it works when the iMac is not busy recompling X over a three day strech of time- or is it no longer 'cool' to make fun of Gentoo's compile times?
(gentoo wasen't actually my first choice- but it's all that I could get to run on it; however I'm quite pleased with it now, and might actually use it on another system when I upgrade)
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
I am not embarrased to state: I am a n00b.
My experience of Linux is probably what? coming to 9 months now I think.
I found ctrl+C and ctrl+V the clunkiest feature in Linux, a real chore, like lifting some-heavy weight.
It is as if there was a lot of conflicting confused communication going between the clipboard and the apps. It felt hard, and at times didn't even work. Often I would resort to a left-click for a pop-up window and then select copy/paste to be more secure.
But this Middle-Button stuff is great!
And I bet because it's a Unix standard - its probably faster and more efficient than ctrl+c/ctrl+v.
The highlighting-that-copies reminds me of that IRC Pirch Program. So much simpler.
You learn something cool in Linux every day - nice one, thanks!
I think this is quite an important point in encouraging people to move across from Windows. I've been slowly teaching my friends (who recently got their first computer, with XP Home) to use copy 'n' paste more and they love the feeling of power it gives them. (Hey, it is their first computer!). If they were moving to linux and discovered one of the few 'power user' things they could do suddenly didn't work it could be enough to put them off for a long time. Yes, I could try to 'educate them' but that's not going to do any good at that point. Not saying that different isn't good but it's something to think about.
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
Although there are already some 300 posts I haven't read one success story yet (then again, I read at +5).
/. crowds? Would the real geeks please stand up ;)
I'm actually extremely happy with the current situation, and use the two mechanisms at the same time. For instance, when I'm editing a text or sourcefile, I use ctrl-x/ctrl-v for moving around large portions of the code. As long as I havened pasted, the original order is still in tact.
Then, using the X-windows selection mechanism, I first clean up the new location before pasting. Especially in large files this saves a lot of scrolling through the text.
nb: perhaps others have written similar stories, but then they weren't modded up till 5: interesting. I only read about 30 `I can't use it so it must be bad stories'. What does this say about the
Oh, and ofcourse you can always choose not to use either of the mechanisms, so please stop complaining. The fact that you have the choice is good. I hate posts saying that this is why F/OSS / Linux / insert keyword here hasn't broken through on the desktop yet.
The klipper applet that runs in the kicker of kde is very use ful to over come the select copy and ctrl+c methods. it combines both and you can copy using select ot ctrl+c select new text to delete and use ctrl+alt+v to select from a list of text copied in the clip board and then use ctrl+v or middle click to paste.
When the F did this happen? :)
Seriously, UNIX/Linux/Solaris/etc have GOT to get on the clipboard bandwagon...
...if I switched to *nix.
I write a lot of short perl scripts that read the clipboard, transform it, and then write it back. De-duplicating lines, converting each line to an entry in a comma-separated list, tr/-_/_-/, translate characters to HTML entities (< to < for instance - there, I just used that one!), wrap the text in <blockquote><i> </i></blockquote> (there - I just used them both!)
In addition, I have them bound to bucky combinations - Ctrl-Shift-Q for blcokquote, Ctrtl-shift-[-] for the -_ swap, thing, etc.
I don't know if this is possible on a *nix desktop, but I can't see a unified *nix clipboard module for perl.
X' clipboard confused my when I started so I made these notes:
X has 2 clipboards. There is a selection buffer which is updated
automatically when you select any text. You can paste from this
buffer by clicking the middle mouse button.
Then there is the clipboard (which can be managed using
the xclipboard utility), which works like the windows equivalent
(Ctrl+Insert or Ctrl+c for copy, and Shift+Insert or Ctrl+v for paste)
Note gnome-terminal uses Shift+Ctrl+c and Shift+Ctrl+v instead.
Note when you copy something in an X application
and you close it, the content of the clipboard and selection
buffer is lost (unless you use an external app to manage the
clipboard (like xclipboard)).
The problem lies mostly with X which implements those selection buffers. One (cut buffer) is never used. Then, you have the primary buffer that gets selections and an actual clipboard. IIRC, the clipboard is restricted to pure text and a potential performance problem since it is stored on the server instead of being handled on the terminal. So if you try to copy a large amount of text via the clipboard on a remote session, that might very well take a long time.
Now, when something is put into the primary, it is not actually copied anywhere. Instead, the application tells X that it is now "owner" of the primary selection. When another application receives a middle mouse button press, X sets up a link between the primary owner and that application and the owner pretty much dumps the selection into the requesting application. There is however the (apparently rarely used) possibility of doing a content-type check and negotiation, so that a text editor might refuse to accept images and the owner can then decide to send a text equivalent (like the filename, URL, alternative text, etc.).
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
I never realized there were two clipboards for copy paste. I've always used the M$ ctrl-ins(or c) or shift-ins(or v) all my life.
Good programmers drink beer to relieve job stress.
Great programmers drink hard liquor and work best hungover.
The worse in my experience is on laptops where you have a touchpad and two crappy thumb buttons. It's infuriating trying to paste things on my HP laptop a lot of the time. I often end up giving up and type the URL in by hand.
And it would be nice if the clipboard(s) handled more than text.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
No, that's completely wrong. You don't need to have a clue. If you don't know anything about it, it works just like Windows. Control+C/V/X. If you are a "power user," however, there is extra functionality that you must understand to use correctly. Said extra functionality doesn't even interact with the "regular" clipboard. Sheesh... Is it too much to ask that people get a clue before chiming in on discussions? "X suxx0rz d00d!"
So it doesn't work like Windows then. Windows CTRL+C/V or right click Copy & Paste works on graphics as well as text in Windows.
Correct, or almost. That is a real problem in X and X apps, and people are too stupid to complain about that and instead complain about problems that don't even exist.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Just like windows. For an extreme case, perhaps you have never tried to use "edit" to edit a text file on Windows XP. It violates all the UI rules for Windows, yet it still apparently ships with windows and some people still try to use it I have observed, because it is called "edit" so it seems to some like it should be the default. Notepad was badly broken in many releases of Windows as well. People had to use a word processor like WordPad to get reasonable text editing.
There are plenty of apps to choose from in a typical Linux distribution, and most work exactly the way they should.
You can find abberant apps if you look hard enough for any OS, but blaming the OS for inconsistency of apps is silly. It is not like this is rocket science or some deep dark secret how it is supposed to behave.
Just because the apps he uses, which he hasn't even identified, are not conformant (but I suspect misreporting and user error) does not mean that there are not standard apps he could be using that are conformant.
I think the Linux/Unix Cut & Paste is WAY better then windows... at work/home i use Linux, Windows, and Solaris... I don't have any problem with Unix cut and paste... I prefer it....
every once an a while some java app are don't copy/paste write... But if i slow down my high speed cut and pasting everything works GREAT!....
I wish windows cut and paste worked like Unix...
Personally, I bind middle click to "shutdown X server"
And the guy admits to user error, his whole complaint is that it is too hard to learn.
Just because the apps you use are conformant, doesn't mean that the apps on his distro are conformant.You are taking the tried and true, "It works for me, so you must be an idiot" path. Why? If 99% of the posters as you say, think there's an issue, doesn't that seem like a good indicator of something that should be improved?
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Using FireFox 0.8 on Fedora Core 2, middle-clicking on the tab bar will load the url in the current (active) tab, ctrl+middle click will open in a new tab.
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
You need a clue as well, about what was posted by most people, about Windows, and a great many other things. The keystrokes that work on the edit program are not the windows keystrokes. And why is expecting an old DOS or older Windows programs (even written by Microsoft) to support standards any sillier than expecting an old X program to do so? Oh, they are Microsoft and you paid them hundreds of dollars, so they can do no wrong.
Just as in Windows, most up-to-date well-supported Linux programs support the standards and many that are not up-to-date or well-supported do.
The poster, and you, were not even cluefull enough to post what program you had the problem with.
IIRC the weird copy and paste in *nix has to do with the selection being stored as CHAR * .. which leads to interesting issues when you are copying something which may or may not be standard ASCII ..
Unix hatersanyone? :-)
Move faster
If they aren't happy with the way things work most people will just use something else. They're not fixers.
Two "clipboards" is too much for most people to handle. Add the fact that some apps want you to use alt-c instead of ctrl-c, some support ctrl-insert in addition to whatever they show in the edit menu, some need ctrl-shift-c, and some only work with the middle mouse button crap - you're looking at a big mess.
If things don't improve most people _should_ continue to use windows OR MacOSX, and leave the complex stuff to the clever people.
Most people are creatures of habit. They like routine. Stuff must behave the same way. Heck if their routine is backing stuff up and reformating and reinstalling windows, so be it, you'd be surprised how many people prefer living in a "predictable" world no matter how tedious it is. They get annoyed with windows not because it crashes, but because it often crashes "unpredictably". If it only crashes if they do XYZ, then they just won't do XYZ. They're not the sort who'd go - ah it crashes, let's see if it's exploitable.
How does Apple do it with MacOSX and various X apps? They're the one who popularized the copy and paste thing with their first Mac OS. Windows just copied the stuff. AFAIK the Mac and Windows style is very similar. So it's better if the X windows people follow the same concept even if it means breaking a few eggs along the way - I personally think breaking the old X apps for better Linux desktop adoption is worth it. Most of the old X apps aren't worth running. Heck you want the old behaviour make it an option and not the default. The smart ones can figure it out.
The stupid ones are more plentiful than the smart ones, so if people _really_ want adoption by the _masses_, then cater for the stupid. So what if the smart ones get annoyed. They're smart, they'll learn, they can workaround almost anything. Do it right and they might even think it's an interesting challenge.
Those who say there isn't a problem, are actually people who don't get it. We're talking about usability. The fact that many people think there is a problem, means there is one. Even if it's because they are confused over something, it means something is confusing and thus there is a problem.
If the OSS developers are happy with the way things work, I'm sure MS will be very happy too and some of the smart ones aren't so smart after all.
Hmmm....
In edit paste is.... Control+V
copy is.... Control+C
Clue anyone?
It doesn't even matter, expecting a old DOS program to act like a windows one is like expecting vi to conform to X standards, it's silly. It was a terrible example.Either way, why not just suggest that the guy use Kde or Gnome apps strictly, that would have been far more constructive than flaming him.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
If it's not an URI, Firefox will try to load Google's lucky-hit for that string.
>Hmmm.... > >In edit paste is.... Control+V > >copy is.... Control+C Hasn't worked for anyone I have seen using the program on XP including a week ago. The cut and paste are weird combinations with the insert and delete keys, if memory serves me. Perhaps you had something operating as part of your Windows command box you were executing it in. That would also explain why you do not mention remove. Is two out of three good enough for you, or is that what the standard says, editors do not need to be able to cut? That is the first command I try to use. I think you are clueless. >Clue anyone? Yes, go find one. >It doesn't even matter, expecting a old DOS >program to act like a windows one is like >expecting vi to conform to X standards, it's >silly. It was a terrible example. The sillyness was about the same as your expectations of old apps to conform to Windows cut copy paste keystrokes. >Either way, why not just suggest that the guy use >Kde or Gnome apps strictly, that would have been >far more constructive than flaming him. If you think that is good advice, then you should go for it. I would not have suggested it, because I have not noticed that this good behavior was restricted to Gnome or KDE apps. But the poster's understanding of things was as screwed up as yours, not understanding that middle click is not a paste from clipboard, so criticizing it was silly, when the rest of the operations work fine in major/supported apps, just as on Windows. The argument that Linux somehow cannot extend the model because it is too hard for a few low-end Windows users to peek outside of their box is just plain silly. Bottom line is that most apps just work, just like on Windows, and blaming Linux for apps that do not is just plain silly, and not reading the documentation to have a clue about an operation for which there is no common Windows equivalent and criticizing it because it does not duplicate existing Windows functionality is something a Microsoft whiner might do, but not anyone with any intelligence or self respect.
I once proposed that the "SECOND" selection in X be used to fix this. When you highlight something new, PRIMARY is copied into SECOND. When you paste, if the selected text is the same as PRIMARY, SECOND is pasted instead of PRIMARY.
This requires toolkit support, but it would solve the problem. SECOND is currently unused.
>Hmmm....
>
>In edit paste is.... Control+V
>
>copy is.... Control+C
Keystrokes haven't worked for anyone I have seen using the program on XP including a week ago. But being unfriendly to users is apparently not a crime when Microsoft does it.
The cut and paste are weird combinations with the insert and delete keys, if memory serves me. Perhaps you had something operating as part of your Windows command box you were executing it in. That would also explain why you do not mention remove. Is two out of three good enough for you, or is that what the standard says, editors do not need to be able to cut? That is the first command I try to use. I think you are clueless.
>Clue anyone?
Yes, I have, but you should go find one.
>It doesn't even matter, expecting a old DOS
>program to act like a windows one is like
>expecting vi to conform to X standards, it's
>silly. It was a terrible example.
The sillyness was about the same as your expectations of old apps to conform to Windows cut copy paste keystrokes.
>Either way, why not just suggest that the guy use
>Kde or Gnome apps strictly, that would have been
>far more constructive than flaming him.
If you think that is good advice, then you should go for it. I would not have suggested it, because I have not noticed that this good behavior was restricted to Gnome or KDE apps.
But the poster's understanding of things was very screwed up, not even understanding basics that middle click is not a paste from clipboard. So criticizing it was silly, and never should have been accepted as a story on Slashdot except for roasting. The rest of the operations work fine in major/supported apps, just as on Windows. The argument that Linux somehow cannot extend the model because it is too hard for a few low-end Windows users to peek outside of their box is just plain silly.
Bottom line is that most apps just work, just like on Windows, and blaming Linux for apps that do not is just plain silly, and not reading the documentation to have a clue about an operation for which there is no common Windows equivalent and criticizing it because it does not duplicate existing Windows functionality is something a Microsoft whiner might do, but not anyone with any intelligence or self respect.
Highlight the URL you want to copy and press Ctrl-C, highlight the URL you want to replace and press Ctrl-V.
If I do that, it pastes the highlighted URL instead of the copied URL. Which is not what I wanted. I'm not sure if this means my X installation is misinstalled or what.
The mouse I have works fine as is, and $10 would get me share in stock that would pass me additional money every three months. Or, you know, food.
Honestly, I might be annoyed that ctrl+c then ctrl+v doesn't do what I expected it to, but buying a new mouse is hardly going to fix that.
I just used apt-get to install the newest X drivers, and now it believes more normally.
Must have been a bug with that version.
Actually the lack of a single standard goes back further than KDE, Gnome, Netscape, or even Linux. Just ask anyone who had a Unix desktop in the late 80's and early 90's, when the workstation vendors started switching over from their proprietary windowing systems (Sunview, Apollo/DM, and so on) to X11.
There were several toolkits in use at the time. Older applications with simple interfaces, such as xterm, might use Athena widgets or raw Xlib. Highlighting and clicking the middle mouse to paste the primary selection was typical.
Some newer applications started using Motif or something similar. They typically supported the highlight and middle click behavior for the primary selection, along with some cut and paste menu items that might or might not interoperate with other applications.
And then there was Sun, who had to do it their own damn way, with things like OpenLook and XView. Highlighting and/or middle mouse behavior in those applications was usually a disaster. The fact that Sun (and others) had custom keys on their keyboards just for cutting and pasting, left over from the days of their proprietary windowing systems, didn't help. Heck, Apollo had about two dozen special keys for window management and other GUI-related stuff.
I've actually got a Solaris 2.4 (circa 1994) machine accessible to me; let's see how /usr/openwin/bin/textedit (an XView
application) behaves:
This is an old, old problem.
Either way, I just went and actually fired up edit, and looked to see what the commands were. No funky commands. You seem to have not verified your info, I have. But what does edit have to do with anything anyway. The only reason it came in is that someone was reaching for some example of windows sucking. What does that prove? The guy isn't trying to use windows.
And why are you all on about windows anyway? You do realize that these key combinatyions are not a MS invention and have been around on the Mac since the beginning, right? The same complaint also comes from Mac users, are they just Apple whiners?My whole point have nothing to do with windows or not windows. You continue to prove my point. You keep jumping through flaming hoops to try to prove that there is nothing wrong with your pet software and this guy complaining must be an idiot. Maybe that's true, but what purpose does that serve? You don't have to take every complaint about your favorite software personally.
If you want to run around calling people who disagree with you clueless, go right ahead. But, don't expect to be taken seriously if you don't have the backup.Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
I'm not really sure how useful that feature is generally (who wants to paste a link anywhere inside the rendered page to load it?), but it's most annoying when you have a wheel-button/scroll-button as your 3rd mouse button. I find I press the middle-button to paste or to load a link in a new tab, and the wheel scrolls a little as I try to press it down, making me middle-click somewhere else. I wouldn't be constantly accidentally activating the feature if my mouse-wheel didn't scroll so easily, or I could (artificially) reduce the sensitivity somewhere.
GrimRC
Well then, could you please try to understand that your problem has absolutely nothing to do with X11 and everything to do with you and the X11 applications you are using. X11 provides, as a default, three different temporary buffers to contain data of any arbitrary datatype. How these buffers are exposed in the GUI of an X11 application is up to the programmers. How the implemented behaviour of the buffers in the X11 application is customised is up to the user's choice of settings in their .Xresources file.
I am sorry you just want to make generalizations and not discuss specific cases. The original poster seemed with his opening sentence to be relating / comparing Windows to Linux. Read the post.
The fact is, like Windows, Linux cut / copy / paste just works in most up-to-date applications, and if you can't figure out how to use the "paste current selection", which is also available on some other platforms, as I pointed out previously (the Mac terminal emulator, for example), then ignore it and it does not interfere.
Mac keystrokes are not the same as Linux for cut / copy / paste, even if they were styled after them (except, for example, when running unmodified Unix apps under X on Mac). Windows does not typically define a command key, but Mac has a control key. You are clueless, again.
I have no windows machines. I have seen edit not provide usable cut copy paste even within the same file using standard keystrokes, that it is clear to me that in most cases it does not work. This has happened more than once as I see Windows users try to use edit to modify a file and unable to figure out how to move a line, and I found the keystrokes for them they had to use, so I think you are wrong, but I will not pay a Microsoft tax to prove it.
The discussion moved to concrete applications like edit because making generalizations is silly and edit was an obvious counter example. Had you brought up other specific applications, then perhaps an intelligent conversation could be had assuming you spent more time getting your facts strait, and made a real argument.
You claim you somehow criticized my favorite apps, without having any clue what those apps might be, because you have failed to discuss them at all -- like a bug report, that just says "it is broken" with no details (not even the applications) that flies in the face of many intelligent users who know things commonly work just fine for them. Had you or the original writer posted any intelligent argument or examples, I might have agreed or disagreed with some of the conclusions. We will never know because the posting and your followups were clueless (as was the understanding of paste current selection, as though that somehow prevented people from just using cut / copy / paste).
middle clicking in the browser window to paste is a horrible BUG
it causes data leaking, it causes confusion, and is just so horrible, that I can't understand why firefox copied konqueror:
however, firefox has the option to make the behavior correct:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44931
is where hardly anything has been done to fix it
in kde, rendering kde unusable
about:config
serching for middle (and later autoscroll) gives you:
middlemouse.contentLoadURL
and something about autoscroll
Konqueror is unusable because it's so hard to close tabs, because you can't middle mouse click on tabs to close them.
it makes no sence to paste onto a tab.
though it makes sence to paste onto the go button
but there is a bug open to stop that!!!!
the other solution, by the makers of the unusable web browser is: klipper , with actions disabled
klipper keeps a history of what's been in the clipboard.
I feel your pain, and miss paste very very often.. but klipper saves me from everything except for konqeuror and text with newlines in dialogs that take enter as execute
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
Hm.. and upon further further investigation, emacs already has a secondary selection behaviour (try alt(meta) + drag-with-left button). I didn't notice previously because my window manager by default grabs that as move-window - but the emacs behaviour is there if I turn off the window manager shortcut. It behaves in other respects as PRIMARY, and in my cursory examination there doesn't seem to be an exchange-primary-secondary command (but it would be a short step to add it, the "hard bit" of secondary selection tracking is already implemented)
Choice of masters is not freedom.