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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?"
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!)
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.
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...
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!
Honestly, I never use a clipboard to copy anything other than text. If I must use a mouse to copy something, I will drag & drop it, not select, copy, select insert point, paste. Honestly, I don't get the whole copy/paste using the Windows style. X's highlight/copy & middle click paste is so much more useful, when used with klipper (or presumably gcm), which eliminates the one weakness of it, and actually makes it better (multiple item storage).
People should try to adapt. Middle click in any browser with a url (at least among konqueror, mozilla & derivatives, opera & everything I can recall using except links.) & it opens it, no need to go to a location bar. Or drag the url & drop it on a browser window.
So many ways to do it, but people will whine that 'the one way' doesn't work. It makes me wonder if there is an intuitive interface for a computer AT ALL. (And, NO, Mac Zealots, the Mac doesn't qualify!) Current GUIs aren't, CLIs don't seem to be, & voice commands are unlikely to be in my opinion.