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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?"
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
... and run Windows! *ducks*
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
For you guys who don't want to run into the copy/paste problem:
Click here
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 only brokenness is the number of old apps that don't use the selection and clipboard correctly. If you stick to well-written applications you really don't even need to know about the selection/clipboard duality. But you'll be more effective if you do understand and exploit it."
;) Serve different purposes? Gee, I thought they were just incompatible methods for doing the EXACT SAME THING, that would be selecting information, making a copy of it to a buffer, and pasting it into another application. Correct me if I'm wrong that's NOT the purpose of the clipboard in ANY implementation.
No, the brokeness is working in an unfamiliar manner compared with EVERY other graphical system in existance without ANY actual gain.
I really don't see how you'd exploit it, it offers nothing that multiple clipboard support doesn't already offer. The best you could hope for is to cope with it.
A well written application would what, copy the data from either method to the clipboard for both? Seems a little pointless to me this way.
Or support both methods... great but what if a person uses the keyboard for some things and the mouse for others and sometimes needs to switch between the two modes of working? Not knowing about the two imcompatible implementations would be a tad troublesome there I imagine.
"I have two different systems for heating food in my kitchen. Is that broken? No, and neither is X cut-n-paste, for the same reason. The two different systems are separate, distinguishable and serve different purposes."
Let's hit this in reverse
Distinguishable. Well I suppose if you ignore that fact that the same commands were implemented in numerous guis before X/Gnome/KDE and have a De Facto if not published behavior on which the X/WMofchoice methods don't improve in any fashion.
Let's come up with something a bit closer to home than appliances which are seperate devices and perform seperate functions. After all the only reason you have two is that although what they do is vaguely related in the sense of preparing food via heat, they are otherwise unrelated. All Microwaves behave more or less similarly and all ovens as well.
Here, closer we have(takes a minute to come up with something else broken in this fashion and decides he needs to make up a scenerio), Twelve modems of identical look, feel, weight, shape, size, color, and capabilities.
All the modems need to have a function to dial. 11 of the modems use the command ATDT# for this purpose, the last modem has a similar command, still ATDT, but it has three jacks (the other not being used and hidden under the plastic casing of the modem). While ATDT is implemented, instead of the standard behavior, ATDT1# dials out on one of the jacks and ATDT0# dials out on the other jack.
This is pretty much the same thing, while the behavior the copy and paste commands is a de facto standard, there are two+ implementations under linux which each implement a portion of it and are incompatible with eachother and none of them are compatible with the de facto standard. The only gain is the other port (clipboard) but it's hidden underneath the plastic where you have to hunt for it. There are also plenty of other modems which add superior functionality and DON'T break the standard.