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Middle-Click Paste? Not For Long
An anonymous reader writes "Select to copy and middle-click to paste. That's very convenient usability feature associated with UNIX graphical environments. But it is confusing for new users, so the ability to middle-click paste was briefly removed from GNOME 3.10. It was restored few days later, but with clear message: middle-click paste will be permanently removed from next GNOME version." I hope that "we'll defer this change until the next cycle" also means that it's getting re-thought, rather than just delayed.
Seriously, these guys need to just fuck off.
Linux is a very nice system, or was until they got their hands on it.
Now it's becoming a cheap-ass knockoff of some nasty hybrid of OSX and Windows with all the unique and useful features removed.
Seriously guys, if you want MacOS just buy a fucking Mac and stop breaking shit in Linux.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You hardly have 3 button mouse these days and clicking on the scroll wheel button was rather inconvenient.
They should include option of enabling this but as long as its not the default most people will not use it.
GNOME has been doing it since the 2.0 release more than a decade ago. Microsoft has nothing on them.
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Or, you know, clicking the scroll wheel
One more reason to try LXDE, MATE or Cinnamon.
Are you serious??? MS has constantly been removing features, from the tool bars in Windows Explorer, to the start menu. Look at the garbage that is Windows 8.
To be fair, users leaving windows, are likely to have a few more brain cells than those sticking with windows 8. Just saying...... ;)
And that's why I'm done with Gnome. They keep doing stupid things and trying to tell me it's for my own good.
I hate select to copy. I frequently highlight words to help myself read them and track where I am. I don't associate highlighting text with copying it, which screws up my internal clipboard memory. Middle click to paste simply never occurs to me. Middle mouse button on Windows is generally application dependent. Since I never middle click, it's function by default is irrelevant. It'd the damned highlight to copy that screws me up.
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
Such optimizing things for new users — while pessimizing the experience for others — is a trap. This is exactly, how you end-up with a dumbed-down system — whether it is an OS, or a user-interface for anything. Easy to get started — maybe, you'll achieve that. Hard to keep going — this one will likely be yours...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Yes, how hard can it be to maintain a fork of a major desktop environment for the sake of a single feature?
All XFCE has to do is not fuck up.
Dear XFCE, Please: just DON'T FUCK IT UP. Thanks.
Christ, at this stage the revived CDE is more appealing than GNOME. Zippy as hell on modern hardware, too ('cos it doesn't do anything).
http://rocknerd.co.uk
That's why I switched to XFCE when GNOME 3 was released. I know what I'm doing thank you! Lowest common denominator design will lead to a low quality production.
It's been configurable in KDE since forever. Together with "focus follow mouse", another X-izm. And it's confusing no for "new users" but for "users coming from Windows background"
Windows 8 does have a start menu, it's just takes up the whole screen.
In windows 7 explorer, pressing 'alt' will give you the old menus back - and the toolbars were moved to the start menu.
No idea where they went in WIndows 8. My experience with windows 8 primarily involved getting a refund.
Diana Moon Glampers as a UX designer. That explains a lot, actually.
I miss the days when it was UI - the user's interface with the computer. An interface. The thing that makes it possible to make the computer do what you want it to do. Design it for maximum functionality with minimal interference.
Somewhere along the line it became UX - the experience. The fluff. The marketing. Doesn't matter if it's functional or not as long as it feels good. You're not allowed to learn anything, you're not allowed to even know how it works. There's nothing to master. Just one button that says "Make it look like whatever the other UX people think is fashionable this year."
In Windows-land, we lost (unless you hack the registry) focus-follows-mouse from XP to 7, and the ability to resize an arbitrary number of windows when we went from 7 to Metro. In Web-land, we lost Firefox. In GNOME-land, we're about to lose middle-click-to-paste. (I probably shouldn't have mentioned focus-follows-mouse, or they'll take that too.)
First they hide the feature. They they claim telemetry says nobody uses it. Then they take it away. (Never mind the fact that the sort of user who does use the feature either delays the upgrade, hacks around the limitation, and is likely to pre-emptively disable telemetry as a matter of course.)
We used to be Emperors and Empresses over our machines. Now that any fool can design a UX, we have UIs designed by fools for fools. It's all kind of mixed up in my mind, but the past five years of change for change's sake have been a doozy.
I don't know that they're jealous.
Just make it a setting. But not the default.
They're using their grammar skills there.
This is totally awesome. Gnome has been taunting me for years, continuously demolishing perfectly fine functionality I use daily, but at the same time just not taking it far enough for me to permanently switch. Not anymore though; this will definitely make me switch to some other desktop environment. Awesome. I'm happy for this loss:-)
0x or or snor perron?!
CTRL+ALT++ or - were NOT to zoom in or out. Those keystrokes switched between desktop resolutions.
They switched between display resolutions, without affecting the desktop resolution. If you had a 1600x1200 desktop and hit CTRL-ALT-+ to get 1024x768, it would display a subset of your large desktop, just larger. You could pan around the large desktop as needed. It was, in effect, a zoom.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Exactly. The user-to-user interface, such as English, is so complex that no-one can ever learn 100% of a language, and the benefit of that is that it enormously powerful.
If we wanted interfaces that were so simple you could learn the whole thing in two weeks, we'd all be speaking in baby talk. What people want is an interface where you can learn the BASICS quickly, then keep learning more forever.
When you dumb down the interface, you're choosing to make the first two months of use easier, at the expense of making the next 20 years of use more difficult.
That's dumb X 120.
You sir, sound like you are expecting an answer from reasonable people.
The GNOME 3 devs have a better than 3 year track record of showing that they are NOT reasonable people. No screen savers, no-left pane in a file manager, or being able to blank your screen instead of sleeping when you close the lid on your laptop. These are features that have been removed with no way to add the functionality back in (xscreensaver and moving to Nemo don't count). These are not the decisions of reasonable people. They have shut the door on these features, and if someone finds a way to hack them in, they then remove the backdoors that allow for that. They are damn serious about making this stuff go away and in their arrogance and hubris believe that they know better than you what you want and need to be productive in a desktop environment.
vi +
Many modern mouses make it hard to click the middle button without scrolling a notch with the wheel at the same time. Incredibly annoying.
I am so sick of seeing shit like this. Just because I enjoy using Windows does not make me the lowest common denominator. I use Linux for several servers and have used Linux on the desktop at numerous times in my life. I just enjoy the simplicity of Windows. I enjoy the simplicity of Macs too.
Lowest common denominator design will lead to a low quality production.
This. A thousand times over. It's at the root of deteriorating software on so many levels, not just in the UI. It's fine to abstract, but abstractions should also have a way to query capabilities of the particular underlying system and make them available should the user of the abstraction wish to utilize them on that system.
Someone had to do it.
it is redundant to have more than one type of copy buffer
Redundant but useful. You have two eyes, but in concert they provide binocular vision. You have two ears, but together they allow you to locate sound sources. On macs back in 1995-1999, I used a program that would provide 10 copy buffers. Very handy utility, that. Today, I like knowing that I have at least two copy buffers without having to resort to opening a text editor as a poor-man's buffer.
it is redundant to have more than one type of copy buffer
Redundant but useful. You have two eyes, but in concert they provide binocular vision. You have two ears, but together they allow you to locate sound sources. On macs back in 1995-1999, I used a program that would provide 10 copy buffers. Very handy utility, that. Today, I like knowing that I have at least two copy buffers without having to resort to opening a text editor as a poor-man's buffer.
I don't know about GNOME but KDE includes a tray tool called Klipper that functions as a multi-buffer and caches the last 10 things you copied so you can switch the contents of the clipboard between any of the last 10 things you copied by right clicking the tray icon and selecting it from the menu.