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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.
The GNOME guys are just jealous of Microsoft taking away the user interface elements that people were used to and they want to show that Open Source can do just a good a job of screwing up an interface as those big-bad corporate types!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Three button mouse, how quaint.
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.
I hope that "we'll defer this change until the next cycle" also means that it's getting re-thought, rather than just delayed.
If you have any hope of that, you've obviously not actually used Gnome for any length of time. Considering their users is not something that Gnome designers seem to have any desire to do.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Please, please, PLEASE make this an option, not a full removal.
I will stop using GNOME if this ability is fully removed.
I don't even like middle-click paste, but why are they removing it? Why not just make it an option, disabled by default, that people can still enable if they want to? This trend of removing stuff just because is rather unsettling.
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.
Seriously? Are they trying to bleed their user-base dry?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
GNOME has been doing it since the 2.0 release more than a decade ago. Microsoft has nothing on them.
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Just another reason not to use GNOME. Hopefully the Xorg people don't start thinking this is a useless feature. I'm still finding myself trying to hit CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to kill X, or CTRL-ALT-+ to zoom in. These were very useful features that were dropped for no good reason at all.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
mouse, how quaint
One more reason to try LXDE, MATE or Cinnamon.
If I ever build a killbot, it will be activated by the phrase "confusing to users."
... but there are other desktop environments for UNIX, fortunately.
Are you sure you want to go with NT though? I heard that Windows 98 is better for games.....
Two questions:
1) How many "new users" did they actually talk to?
2) How many GNOME users are there, and of those users, how many are "new"?
It sounds to me like they're removing a feature that millions of people use, on a whim.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Actually, I've already ditched Gnome. I liked Gnome 2, but so many of the features I liked and actually used were removed for Gnome 3 that I finally bit the bullet and just switched to XFCE. I miss some of the features of Gnome 2, but not Gnome 3.
And if I hadn't, removing middle button paste and not even making it an option would have run me off even faster. At least I spent some time trying to like Gnome 3 before giving up.
Seriously, they can have my middle mouse button paste when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
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.
The only result that this will have is either
1.) derivative products adding it back in or
2.) users moving to a different platform
Wake up idiots!!! Do you see how many forks of your project exist these days? That's because they have no other means to fix your broken products. Gnome is becoming un-recommendable as a desktop for all their idiotic design decisions. From now on, your options are KDE if you want a qt-based setup or Xfce/LXDE if you want gtk. Gnome no longer exists to me.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
To be fair, users leaving windows, are likely to have a few more brain cells than those sticking with windows 8. Just saying...... ;)
They don't remove features, they just move them to somewhere less convenient.....
WinME FTW
I love my sig.
So who cares what they do?
Can be likened to that terrible M. Night Shyamalan movie where people are killing themselves for no reason. (Spoiler: Something to do with the trees if I remember right...) I just see Microsoft jumping off a cliff, followed by the Gnome developers. Who will go crazy next?
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
Middle click inserts the current selection, pasting inserts the cut buffer. They are two different things.
Removing this feature seems stupid; it's not only been around forever and people are used to it, it's also very useful. In particular, it's nice to have in addition to cut-and-paste.
At the very least "insert selection here" should be configurable under mouse settings.
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.
Where the middle button shines, is when one need to copy and paste two pieces of junk from one window to another:
Select the first part, Ctrl-C, select the second part, then move on the target window and Ctrl-V to paste the first part and middle click to paste the second part.
There's no way one can easily do this without the middle button paste. Is there ?
(and desktop clipboard history isn't very ergonomic, last time I tried)
I must admit I don't use this feature very often, but I like it a lot when it comes handy.
Let me guess: You have never used it.
This feature is so mind-boggingly *convenient* I really don't know how to work without it.
No, using ^C ^V is not an alternative – I use *both*, because it gives me *two* clipboards to work with.
Touch/tap is clearly winning over click these days and default UI metaphors should follow. I hope a middle click can be bound to an action just like any other key for those who do have a desktop style mouse.
But worse, select/middle click DOESN'T use the same clipboard as Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V. Plus, there is no way to replace existing text with paste, since selecting it nukes your clipboard. All these things put together make me wish gnome didn't chicken out and addressed this now.
They should just remove CTRL + C and CTRL + V as well while they are at it. Not only is it not very discoverable, but it also requires you to use the keyboard. Drag and Drop is so much better and obviously the correct way to do copy paste.
There's nothing abstract about it. You mark an object with the mouse, then you paste it into something else by pointing at it with the mouse and middle clicking. It's no more specific than any other clicking you might do.
That something else may typically be a text entry widget but it doesn't have to be.
who still uses gnome? Certainly Ubuntu and Fedora thrust it into the user experience for all of us but how long does it stay around until the average slashdotter can get XFCE, Fluxbox or Awesome installed?
3 has devolved into a screaming race to the bottom alongside KDE, mod points be damned. Gnome started out as a sly wink to Mac, an environment the users of the once famed #2 OS could find themselves at ease just as KDE was a sly wink to windows. These days either environment is the equivalent of a bathsalt trip down pick-and-choose lane. should an icon slide? or click? in Gnome 3 it can do both in some applications... which is an infuriating experience for mouse users but screw the base. the user needs yet another input-driven excuse for wild cirque du soleil gesticulations in the pursuit of his tablet experience. Hotspots? lets put them everywhere. the Dock? lets make it meaningless icons you'll either wait to metriculate from the edge of the screen or bungle into trying to get to a different menu entirely, which incidentally is now totally obscured by the dock. Reverse course captain stubing, the mouse has run aground. how do we power the machine off? click the tiny gear in the upper right hand corner but full stop captain! the mouse! she's moored in another hotspot which has pulled up an entire screen of random unlabeled icons. If you've the latest graphics card this screen will snap to attention like a seasoned warrior, but for anyone a few years dated the experience is beguiling as the screen slowly dims and icons like so many phantoms gradually condense into existence.
releasing the knowledge that the middle-click paste is being deprecated in gnome is like learning the news that your senile aunt who once enjoyed pudding cups, now only eats pudding on a stick. its different for auntie but expected behavior in the context of the other nursing home residents.
Good people go to bed earlier.
There, I said it. While I still prefer Gnome's integration with the OS to other alternatives like KDE or ICE, I stopped using Gnome as my primary desktop environment a long time ago. (I use sawfish as my primary because of the easily scriptable lisp backend and REP loop.). I usually keep a Gnome session active on a different ttty for the rare occasion that I want to use some of the added functionality that it provides, but this is pretty rare these days.
I find it fascinating that a group of people would actually consider removing this entire piece of functionality the better option in lieu of simply making it a configuration item.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
It should be optional or application specific and not defined as paste by default in the WM in general.
huh?
The window manager has nothing to do with it. The WM controls the windows.
Middle-click-paste only works in places where pasting makes sense, like text areas. In other programs like 3D viewers and editors it has a completely different function, like panning or rotating.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The clipboard isn't visible, but it's absolutely a virtual physical space related to the mouse. Because selections are, by and large, made by the mouse - and this is truer for novice users than for experienced users.
So, it's not nearly as "abstract" as you're claiming - it's saying "grab the thing I put in my pocket, and put it where I'm touching."
You must have misunderstood how it works in classic X apps. You read as if you have never used it in X.
Paste-on-middle-click pastes into the text area that you middle-click on, and nowhere else.
The mechanism is also separate from the usual Cut/Copy/Paste functionality. Middle-click is used to paste the selected text, not what is on the clipboard. It is very fast and convenient, done completely with the mouse. The modality is not broken.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
I mean, sure... I can understand it being difficult for new users to adapt to. I can even understand it being removed as a default behavior out of the box, but why can't the feature just be a configurable setting in the window manager's properties file?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Usually it is left mouse button for selecting. Right mouse button for opening a context menu. Middle mouse for pasting and opening/closing any tab. Talking about removal of the middle mouse button functionality makes me think you want a one button mouse (which is fine but non-standard in linux). If you take away the existing middle mouse click functionality it will literally be a vestigial button.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
New user is not aware of this feature (middle click paste). They are not aware of click in the middle mouse button in terminals or editors. So, remove it will just break advanced users, not help new users.
I think the problem with Ubuntu is similar to the problem at M$. They feel that they have to make UI changes (they call them improvements) to show the end user it's not the same old thing.
I've really been wondering why a company doesn't just build something like litestep (basically a module loader and a large collection of modules) and continually beef each shell module's capability. Come up with a new layout each release to prove to people you're changing, while leaving old layouts around for people who liked them better.
Even the tech support guy not knowing how to tell you to do things over the phone would be no worse than it was with previous OS iterations "switch to '98 interface then click the gray bar" or they could now do the whole remote desktop thing.
I think the main problem here might be that developers are confusing two things:
1. Actual PCs to do actual work on
2. Tablets and other gadgets
STOP trying to design one single user interface that "works" for both systems: it doesn't. These two devices are different and they are used in different ways. Therefore they should have different GUIs and different software.
The two most commonly mentioned are Cinnamon and Mate, both of which are forks of GNOME (the former of GNOME 3, the latter of GNOME 2). There are also plenty of other popular desktop environments; Xfce is great, LXDE is... improving (especially with the move to Qt), and I hear KDE has improved a lot in the past decade. I'm pretty sure every single one I've mentioned retains this functionality and will. Heck, even Unity will probably retain it. And at this point, with the GNOME devs pretty much doing whatever they want and ignoring any and all criticism, there's little reason to continue to use GNOME. Its dominant position is fading (if not already gone), so even that's out the window, now.
As long as XFCE continues to behave sanely, we'll be fine.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Same here. And by, "I will stop using", I mean well... Debian Wheezy is already frozen with a version of GNOME that works. So, once that is released, in another 3-4 years or so if they have made this changes AND it is included in the next Debian, then I will definitely stop using GNOME...sometime in the next 5 years, assuming that old versions are not easily available or I don't find an alternative that I like before then. So.... I can definitely say that the chances of me switching out GNOME in the next decade is looking more likely.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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
The next version of Gnome will only support the StupidaMouse as a pointing device.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Isn't this (middle clicks) at least partly because of Wayland? I thought that this middle click thing was X11-specific. You know, the PRIMARY versus CLIPBOARD selections etc. Does Wayland even have these notions (seeing as it doesn't pretend to be an operating system)?
Ezekiel 23:20
Are you suggesting they've been elopping Linux for so many years? Looks like Linux is more robust than Nokia but it's showing some cracks. They'll have to walk over my cold body to take away middle click paste from me. There will always be patches that restore it or some other sane DE.
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.
This goofy shit is why I quit using gnome years ago. Even unity is better than this one size fits all usability shit that's handed down. I mean, at least give us a configuration option for it.... Anyway, I thought the gnome shell was even less relevant than unity. Cinimon? I kindof like the tiling window managers. I don't see the big thrill with gnome anyway. It's not a window manager... It's not a window decorator... what is it exactly? desktop what? I tried to live without it completely and used ratpoison for like 2 years. Tiling window managers have their own annoyances, but I really honestly didn't miss gnome. In fact, it was refreshing to not have usability dictated down. I often dictated it up by patching ratpoison -- which is small enough for me to modify easily. Yeah, I suppose I could patch gnome too, but this kind of user hating stuff comes down super regularly from these guys.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
I second that!!!! I'm ready to switch back to TWM if I have to!
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.
With any luck it will be added back via the gnome extensions page shortly after.
Yuck. I am not a desktop enthusiast. I don't have all day to try different extensions to get back what many consider to be basic features. I want a desktop that does its job according to some simple conventions, and otherwise keeps out of my way. A desktop is like a basic utility, not like a luxury item. A phone should (at the very least) work well as a phone -- if it doesn't then it is failing in its purpose. Desktops too. GNOME seem to have forgotten all of this.
First off it's not a 'paste'that is a construct from a quite different paradigm. It's a 'yank.' There is no copying and there is no pasting, it simply yanks the highlighted text into position at the mouse pointer. That's actually a pretty fundamental command that is performed often by users of all experience levels. Removing it would probably really outrage a lot of their users except that they have already driven away all the users that have a clue years ago.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I noticed middle-click paste doesn't work on my Chromebook, either. That is, until I installed Chrubuntu-KDE, then it worked fine.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Debian also did a bunch of improvements in their local branch, so I would not be surprised if the version that ends up in Jessie will be slightly different from upstream.
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.
and every time they announce something, I feel ever more satisfied with that decision. Keep up the good work, Gnome!
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I wonder if this is the same thinking that went into screwing up paging in Evince (a GNOME project). I find lately that middle-click in the Evince scroll bar does nothing, and left clicking causes a jump to that location (like middle-click is supposed to do, and does in other apps) rather than a page forward. And then there's replacing the menus with buttons on the right like chrome. Ugh.
Fortunately, I've moved to MATE (and mate-doument-viewer a.k.a atril).
I wish GNOME would switch to EBCDIC. Then we could finally sweep its dust from the floor and get back to having fun. Bye, GNOME.
That's one of the features I really like about a *nix environment. Between this and the ambiguity of how remoting support will work (or not work) in Wayland it is really begining to feel like the Linux desktop is under attack. It's all good as long as we still have choices, I switched away from Gnome years ago because to me it seems to tend towards copying those 'features' of Windows which I dislike. (hiding too deeply or removing customization options, dumping everything in a registry, etc...) With Ubuntu getting so much attention all the time though.. I worry our choices will fade away.
I get it that they want to make it easy for new users but what is the value if the result is just to copy the user interface and functionality of the competition? Where is the unique value? Why not just shift development away from *nix and go work on ReactOS?
Just imagine that when you dragged across some text with your virtual finger, it got stuck on the end of it. Then wherever you poke your virtual finger, the text appears. Not so unnatural after all.
I guess I don't understand what the problem is here. There are numerous ways to do this yourself, using imwheelrc for example, but there are others. I don't see the big controversy.
you realize that reverting that change would be a simple matter of selecting one line and m...
oh hell no...
It was fun while it lasted.
Hey everyone. Tired of every new iteration of Gnome screwing up more and more with the UI? Switch to IceWM. You may dislike it. You may even hate it. But seeing as it's (mostly) a dead project, you can be reasonably assured it can't get any worse. :)
PS - I prefer IceWM. There's certainly ways I'd like to see it improved, but most of that would involve completely redesigning IceWM from a stacking to a compositing design--so, yea, I don't expect anyone to go through the effort for the marginal improvement. Beyond that, IceWM has been for me the WM with the least issue of focus stealing windows, and that's reason enough to stick to a WM.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
I've been using LXDE since having a N900 years ago and never looked back.
It's installed it on all my Linux machines (Lubuntu). It's small, low resource and very stable.
Quite frankly I don't miss gnome at all.
Gnome may take you middle-button but give them the middle-finger in return.
Good ol' Tom's. Nothing beats that.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
You mean `fixing' like getting your dog or cat `fixed'? Because that's what it looks like from this long-time Linux user's perspective.
I gave up on Gnome -- after probably ten years as a happy user -- once that tablet-like interface was introduced. I tried it and found it completely unusable as a desktop interface. At least KDE still allows me to work the way I am comfortable with. Once they go off the rails like the Gnome team, I'll be looking for a new desktop (back to Enlightenment, perhaps). What worries me is the collateral damage that the Gnome team will do to the rest of Linux that will make it too difficult -- or worse, impossible -- to configure the way I like.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
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 a very timely article for me. I installed Linux a week ago for a person with a junked copy of Windows Seven. To give you an idea of their technical expertise. They knew how to copy a URL from the address bar in a browser with right-click-copy and then go to a different tab, and right-click-paste to place the text in an email. So I get a call last night and she wanted to know how to do it in Linux. It had not even crossed her mind that a right-click might give her a context menu with the cut/copy/paste options. She is that computer illiterate. I mentioned ctrl-c ctrl-v, but she does not like the keyboard.
Then I remembered how much easier I find doing it the Unix way and why I hate getting stuck on Windows. Select then middles click is second nature to me. So I showed her how to do it. It took about 30 seconds to show her, and another minute or two to do it again and then let her do it. Funny thing is, she picked right up on it. It is NOT a confusing thing to a new Linux user. It is a useful feature and a good differentiator from Windows.
GNOME seems to want to remove any feature in Linux that makes Linux better than Windows.
vi +
Exactly. I have completely gotten used to the 2 clipboard model. One on the right click copy, and/or ctrl+c, and one on the highlight then middle click mode which is good for more immediate uses. Would love it if Windows/OSX implemented something like that.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
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?!
Sorry, but to the 1% of new users that can't understand "middle button = paste": go back to windows.
If we keep dumbing everything down so that the lowestt 1% of stupid retards out there can get it, then we're just gonna end up with a mess like MS Windows again.
At least dont permanently remove it, just make it an option that can be disabled by the 1%.
Lots of things are confusing for new users but that doesn't mean you should break 40+ years of ingrained behavior and functionality for them. Frankly, if people can't bother learning that middle click == paste they probably shouldn't be running Linux in the first place.
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.
... a statement like
doesn't make any sense. Most long time Windows users that I know welcomed a means of pasting text without extra keystrokes. And were more than a little jealous of what I could do on Linux without reaching for Ctrl-V all the time. It was/is downright painful to watch a Windows user cut/select-n-paste in a DOS window. Just who was the Gnome team surveying anyway? Idiots?
It appears that the Gnome team won't be happy until Linux is just as much of a pain in the ass to use as Windows is.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Well, yea but, how can we make this Obama's fault?
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 +
gnome should add CLA so they can be cool as M$!
CLA is always preferred by any POWER-user!
But Microsoft gets to force users down the path of "improvement" by discontinuing security updates for old versions, as is about to happen to XP users in the spring. And it's not so much about the home users as it is the organizations that have thousands of seats... ka-ching! As this started out about the middle mouse button I would be remiss if I did not share this little tool I have used for years to give Windows a ton of mouse control and options:
http://www.highrez.co.uk/downloads/XMouseButtonControl.htm
That thing has layer (I think of them as profiles) support so you can have five custom mouse configs all stored and ready at the... yes... click of a mouse. Very handy.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
This is a real WTF. Anyone who takes away middle-click to paste gets a new middle from me: My middle finger.
It's still funny how configurable Windows is these days when compared to Linux desktops. I think KDE is the only one that has retained all the bells and whistles.
Emacs has the kill ring: press one button to paste the last thing you cut/copied, press another afterwards to cycle through the clipboard history.
So with cua-style copy/paste keybindings it would go something like: select first part, Ctrl-C, select second part, Ctrl-C. Move to target, Ctrl-V, Alt-V to paste first part, Ctrl-V to paste second part.
Of course the problem is you can only use it inside emacs (as usual with emacs...). Maybe it's possible to create a program to do this in X/Wayland?
http://compsoc.man.ac.uk/~shep/
The decision is being made on the mailing list at desktop-devel-list@gnome.org .
You can read or subscribe at:
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Yep, I also found that incredibly convenient that you have two separate clipboards with Linux, without having to install any other software.
Moved to Cinnamon a long time ago and not looking back to Gnome Shell, I only hope that don't kill the entire GNOME project since that is (was?) the foundation of Cinnamon.
Rehdon
Just make it a setting.
Exactly that they don't tolerate.
How is scrolling under the pointer a generic action? It wasn't, until the late 90s. And maybe your window isn't scrollable at all, or only horizontally. To me you're drawing a very arbitrary barrier.
There's also little known multiple selection feature of X whereby you can select a range of text to copy and then select a second range of text to paste over rather than just inserting at the insertion point. Very few tools support it since none of the modern toolkits provide for it. It's basically limited to some Motif apps and Emacs.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Great. Then we will continue to middle click paste in Windows then. Oh wait...
http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse/
4DWM for the win :)
And on the Eighth Day, Man created God.
Never used it. Skipped from Gnome 2 to KDE 3 (now 4). All I'm going to say is that I'm glad that I can chose my desktop environment on *NIX.
J-F
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
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.
Cinnamon here, but same basic theory. My anger about gnome 3 has decreased significantly since switching. I look at these threads more with amusement than with rage at this point.
If you are still on gnome3 and angry, it's really worth getting out while the getting is good.
Does anybody who understands the interface use Gnome any more?
Window Maker FTW.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
There is something very broken : you want to paste something into a URL bar, but first have to delete about 80 characters. So you select the last 80 characters of the current URL, then press del, or backspace if you're illiterate, then middle click and bam you paste the text you've just deleted and lose the text you had copied.
It's silly but infuriating and pissed me off for a few years, till I installed a Firefox extension that cleans the URL bar on left click (it adds a broom icon on the bar's right). For some reason the feature was present in the dillo browser, over half a decade before.
I can speculate it's why Gnome 3 devs want to break it.
Also I had middle-click not functioning in epiphany-browser, version 3.4! but the breakage is semi-random. Another feature is you can't scroll though tabs with the scrollwheel, which makes it painful (a shame, because elsewise the browser feels like a better, less resource hungry Google Chromium)
These devs will burn in Hell.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Don't get me wrong, I do like my middle-click paste. If this is due to Wayland, I'm okay with it. I would not be surprised that Wayland removes this most basic function because it is redundant to have more than one type of copy buffer. One of the main reasons for Wayland is to get rid of the crud in X that has built up over the yeas. If that means loosing one of the past buffers, fine with me. People, get over it!
The mechanism is also separate from the usual Cut/Copy/Paste functionality. Middle-click is used to paste the selected text, not what is on the clipboard. It is very fast and convenient, done completely with the mouse. The modality is not broken.
Well, almost. It pastes whatever's in the buffer. This is usually whatever was selected last, but sometimes when text becomes deselected something clears the buffer, too. So it's a tragically flaky feature, though cool when it works. Which is usually, but a feature which usually works is aggravating as shit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I use middle mouse button even if it's a wheel. I use middle mouse scrolling in firefox all the time. In Counterstrike I will unbind "mwheelup" and "mwheeldown" to not trigger them by accident. I will prefer a straight old three-button mouse to one where the scrollwheel works but not the third button (thanksfully the scrollwheel always clicks as third button. Only laptops make it more complicated)
I don't understand, how can it "confuse people"? If you know about it, then it's very easy to use. If you don't know about it, then either you'd never notice it OR you'd discover words appearing on middle-click and figure out what's going on pretty quickly. For the most part, Linux users are of above average tech savy and would likely understand without instruction. IF you were concerned about people getting confused then you could either: A. disable by default or B. bring up a "did you notice you just pasted some text?" info box the first time the user performs the action. This isn't hard. Why would the Gnome people think the correct solution is to remove the feature? Idiotic. I switched from KDE to Gnome when KDE 4 happened and then from Gnome to XFCE when Gnome 3 happened. I really hope XFCE stays sane or I'll be CLI only in ten years time.
soylentnews.org
But it is confusing for new users, ... [so] middle-click paste will be permanently removed ...
Because new users are new forever and can never learn anything. /sarcasm
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Don't forget to install the javascript extension for user ~nicci310ify, rated two or three stars and published on october 2011 with one update in november 2011, so that you can add an ability like being able to mute the sound or change the date format in the top bar.
Middle-click-paste only works in places where pasting makes sense, like text areas. In other programs like 3D viewers and editors it has a completely different function, like panning or rotating.
Pasting also makes sense in a 3D modeling tool. Having very different functions for the button is only confusing.
GNOME has been doing it since the 2.0 release more than a decade ago. Microsoft has nothing on them.
I would like to take the chance to mention that I've moved almost an entire office from Windows to Kubuntu based on "little things" like an integrated system monitor that shows temp, the ability to set an arbitrary window as "always on top" and middle-click paste. I am so glad that I didn't move them to a Gnome-based distro now!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I meant "from user", but I use gnome and there was a clippy assistant that said "looks like you've finished writing your comment. congraturations!"
Just imagine that when you dragged across some text with your virtual finger, it got stuck on the end of it. Then wherever you poke your virtual finger, the text appears. Not so unnatural after all.
You might be onto something, but in that case it might be a good idea to paint the tip of the mouse cursor red, or something like that, to indicate that there is content "stuck" on it.
Middle finger to Gnome. I'm an xfce user these days, but I still care about having a good Gnome in the mix because its presence would help every desktop. As things are now, Gnome sucks. Even classic mode sucks.
In Windows XP with TweakUI, Autohotkey, ResHack and a few tools like a "Minimize To Tray" one, I could do things I cannot do in Mate or Xfce.
I never understood why something like Mono had to be brought into Linux world. The .NET Framework does not suit there at all. Or are there actually people that get value from Mono? Please educate me. :)
...is the ability to right-click to select a menu option and keep the damn menu open.
I've given up on doing this in Windows, but is this doable in any of the Linux desktop environments? And by "doable," I mean an easy to enable option that doesn't involve recompiling the kernel or burying my grandmother in soft peat for three months.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
GNOME seems to want to remove any feature in Linux that makes Linux better than Windows.
I'm so relieved this is only a Linux problem. Since I use GNOME on FreeBSD, will I still have the middle-click-copy behaviour?
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.
...basking in the glory of a desktop environment that doesn't go out of it's way to remove stuff I use and stop me from working the way I want to. I think all the non-GNOME desktops can expect to gain some users from this, and I dearly hope that that no-middle-click-to-paste virus doesn't infect any other software projects.
I actually wonder what the cry here is anyway. My impression was that there was not many GNOME users in /. anyway, as many of them had jumped the ship a long ago for other reasons.
And McDonalds continues to sell burgers in ridiculous quantities (in case you're too slow to understand what I'm getting at: just because more people use it doesn't make it better).
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Speaking of context menus, even to this day I have not understood the point of the context menu key in a "Windows keyboard" (next to the right Win key). Does someone really use it? Even Caps Lock is more useful than that.
Why would you do that?
MATE, personally. I've used XFCE4 in the past, but still has just a few too many rough edges for me.
Surprisingly, MATE did rather well in his tests, here. Better than XFCE4. Shame MATE still isn't ported to ARM.
http://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/a-memory-comparison-of-light-linux-desktops/
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Fuck YOU!!!
Using the select buffer (as opposed to copy buffer) and middle-click paste is and has been a feature of all Unix/Linux windowing implementations... and one that I _rely_ on... Especially when it comes to working in a terminal. When I click inside a windows VM, it's one of the things I always miss. If it is removed, it's one of the first extensions that I would find a way to get... Sure, take it out of core (for the neophytes), but it needs to be an extension at least for us old guys that could actually participate in your dev process via at least giving you more coherant bug reports (and maybe even fixes) than "my window doesn't work right." Gnome should be very careful to stop "ticking off" developers, but to think of them first at least -- even if it is through creating extensions for each feature they remove.
It used to be completely reliable. I've heard that some Gnome apps abuse the buffer for no apparent reason though.
I read the internet for the articles.
When I was first getting into Linux, I remembering thinking "hmmm, seems like there's two major desktop environments . . . well, I've liked KDE when I've tried it in Knoppix, I'll just go with that." Dodged. A. Fucking. Bullet. With a brief moment of doubt at the start of the KDE 4 transition (where I clung to KDE 3.5), it's just been a constant parade of pain on the GNOME side as feature after feature is removed because . . . reasons? At this point the ultra-minimalist Openbox config I tweaked long ago and log into sometimes (on the underpowered second-hand iMac I have in my bedroom it's the default) is more feature-packed than GNOME. I'm really glad I never grew attached or used to GNOME at any point.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
>GNOME seems to want to remove any feature in Linux that makes Linux better than Windows.
Fine. Help "remove" their fucking user base. :-)
Slashdotters have a lot of influence on new Linux users, so slam GNOME and discourage adoption in any way you can. GNOME will not be fixed, GNOME leadership don't give a fuck about you, me, or anyone not them, so help dry up the user base and guide new users to friendly distros which use a DE you like.
Reward the good, shun the bad, spread the word to reinforce the good.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Because then they can't start using the middle-click for other things (which is what they seem to be planning).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I don't understand, how can it "confuse people"? If you know about it, then it's very easy to use. If you don't know about it, then either you'd never notice it OR you'd discover words appearing on middle-click and figure out what's going on pretty quickly. For the most part, Linux users are of above average tech savy and would likely understand without instruction. IF you were concerned about people getting confused then you could either: A. disable by default or B. bring up a "did you notice you just pasted some text?" info box the first time the user performs the action. This isn't hard. Why would the Gnome people think the correct solution is to remove the feature? Idiotic. I switched from KDE to Gnome when KDE 4 happened and then from Gnome to XFCE when Gnome 3 happened. I really hope XFCE stays sane or I'll be CLI only in ten years time.
I think it was around 4.4, if I remember, that KDE 4 finally seemed to be actually better than 3.5, and it's consistently gotten more stable as time has gone on. Hell, even the stuff that's been "removed" in KDE is just not in the default core now, for example Konqueror is still around. And the focus in KDE-land may be on having simple and understandable defaults, but almost never at the expense of features and configurability for the experienced or intelligent users; everything that vanished during the KDE 3.5 -> 4.x transition that I cared about has since been reimplemented, and hell, even the default launcher can be switched to the classic style if you want, and you can replace it with something else (I generally use Lancelot Launcher), or move it to the middle of your taskbar, or don't even have a taskbar, etc etc etc. While GNOME has been excising configuration and features, KDE has quietly become solid (again, around 4.4 or so) and absurdly malleable box of Lego pieces by which you can construct whatever desktop environment you really want.
But, you know, if XFCE goes crazy, don't fully resort to CLI right away. There's always Openbox! On the used iMac I have in my room which has a woefully underpowered . . . everything, I run Openbox as my default session, with tint2 as my taskbar, and KRunner bound to command+spacebar (the mac keyboard makes that feel a bit natural, but if you have a normal keyboard than the standard alt+f2 makes sense). Then add whatever file manager you like, and of course Yakuake, for all that nice drop-down terminal goodness, so you can ease your transition into curmudgeonly CLI-only user ;) But no, joking aside, that's exactly my setup and it works pretty well for me (KDE apps in Openbox, launching things with either KRunner or Yakuake) and it's a nice blend of minimalism and GUI where each moving piece can be replaced with alternatives (the wallpaper setter is deprecated? time to install any of a dozen others and change a line or two in that script). So if even XFCE goes crazy and starts messing everything up, do consider a lightweight environment like Openbox.
...until Wayland comes around and breaks everything ;)
(No, no, I'm sure X.org will still be an option for a long long time now, and either Openbox will be ported to work on Wayland or other alternatives will arise; the good thing about a minimalist environment is that you don't really need a giant organization behind it, a single dev or two can scratch their own itch et voila, we have a nice simple fallback plan.)
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
No, select to select and middle-click to paste selection; currently, I think the Athena widgets (as used by Good Old Xterm), GTK+, and Qt all implement the freedesktop.org clipboards specification (and I think at least some other toolkits, such as Motif, might behave that way as well; Open Look used the middle button, rather than Shift+left button, to adjust the selection, so XView and OLIT didn't work that way), so that selecting selects (but doesn't copy to the clipboard) and middle-click pastes the selection (rather than the clipboard).
"Select to copy", updating the clipboard if you merely select something, might well be confusing to new users and inconvenient for all users; fortunately, that's not how the feature actually works.
I'm not certain how "middle-click to paste the selection" would be confusing to new users, other than being surprising if the user happens to have something selected and accidentally clicks the middle button. That might justify making it an option, and even defaulting to "disabled", but dropping it entirely (by which I presume they mean "removing support for it from GTK+") doesn't seem appropriate.
Indeed, most good software development tools allow you to copy/yank code into any of multiple buffers, allowing you to paste from any number of items.
In Visual Studio one of the most useful plugins I have includes a copy/paste buffer that includes the past 10 clipboard entries that I can choose from if I want.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Shocking, I know, but all scroll wheel mice are three button mice. If you click down on that scroll wheel instead of scrolling it, you get the third button click.
If only "common" sense was actually that common...
Does anybody actually know the reason WHY they are removing a useful feature? I would assume it is so that touch (mobile) and desktops can share the same paradigm. The interesting thing about this decision is that Microsoft has failed miserably at Windows 8 and every tablet they ever released because they couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that the two devices serve different purposes. Windows 8 sucks because nobody wants to demote their desktop into a tablet. Microsoft tablets suck because nobody wants to produce content on a device with a crappy or non-existing keyboard. Gnome removing middle-button functionality to converge desktop and mobile will probably end badly for Gnome.
Must say, your interpretation of removed took two reads. Usually it's moved them from A to B, not removed them from A to B.
I've read both Windows and Linux aficionados quote user base percentages in arguments. Both sides use quantity sold as a metric.
Perhaps they'd care to remove the ALT+Mouse1 (window drag), because that's too confusing (or convenient) for users, as well?
No, they just don't like to expose them in the main GUI. Heck, they're even getting better in some respects. In Gnome2, you had to dig around in the general gnome settings to turn on sloppy focus, which could be fairly painful. In Gnome3, you just have to go to the tweak tool.
But yeah, if they get rid of middle-paste entirely, I'll be switching either back to fvwm or to something else entirely, like XFCE or Enlightenment.
One haded copy and past is very handy. Something I will not give up easily, and seeing as how 12.04 (with Gnome Panel) will be around for a while, I will not have to. I know a lot of people that stayed with Gnome 2 until Gnome Panel was a stable and supported option on Gnome 3. I am sure there will be a patch for this.
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.
Now that Gnome Panel has a maintainer going forward, Gnome 3 can perform just like Gnome 2. For an example look at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PreciseGnomeClassicTweaks and try it. So I am SURE there will be workaround to get back the middle mouse instead of the middle finger.
The x buffer paste works also by pressing both buttons, at least in the default debian distro I use.
I think selecting and middle clicking is way faster than copypasting, I wonder if gnome devs are using any linux desktop in their everyday computing.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
vi and clones have 26 named buffers + 9 delete buffers + 1 yank buffer. I actually remember one day using up some 10 named buffers. I have one mouse buffer that works everywhere and one Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V that only works in certain programs.
I've read through the wiki page linked, and sure, they have a point, even several points. At least one won't have to use Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V to copy (imagine the havoc in a terminal). However, it all falls down on the fact that I *like* having two distinct buffers, and that I *want* to paste with a single click.
I also want focus-follows-mouse (I managed to do that in Gnome), and I'm extremely annoyed that when I click-to-select or click-to-paste(!) in a window Gnome seems to think that I also want the window to go to the front (never did manage to correct that in Gnome, but it was a breeze in KDE). I've yet to try out XFCE et al.
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.
I usually do one install of the latest Fedora release with whatever version of Gnome is bundled with it into a VM just to confirm that I still can't stand it. What I don't understand is all of the people who install Gnome and then the "classic shell". If it really worked it wouldn't be so bad but there's a lot of traffic on the Fedora mailing list from people who do this and then they can't get some application to work or some feature (like middle click paste) no longer works.
Another vote for XFCE here.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Context sensitivity should only effect the help that is asked for. It was the intrusion people didn't like. It forced you to stop and answer, no ignoring it. I always x'd it, 'cause he just hovered there doing annoying little movements like you were boring him.
One of the most sought after searches was on how to turn it off.
I switched my LMDE from MATE to Cinnamon due to a weird crash on reboot. It's fine, but I cannot get the damn thing to *not* make any system noises whatsoever (clunk when inserting a USB stick, clunk when deleting a file). I guess 'Mute' in system settings has a different definition than the common one.
Or maybe they want to ape Macs. The problem with that is given a choice between pretend-MacOS and real MacOS, people will choose the real one.
There are rare occasions when I would like to have multiple clipboards, but most of the time, like your example, if you're using a multi-window GUI properly it's not an issue. Copy the first bit, paste, copy the second bit, paste. Your example becomes relevant if you're using one of these "new" one window/full screen UIs. Or an 80's era one window/full screen UI. Whichever.
What IS useful is a clipping application that sits somewhere unobtrusively and lets you store random stuff for use later, so you don't have to find it again. Neither select and paste nor copy and paste work well for that.
Probably, most people here use Gnome, as it's been the default on most distros since the late 90's.
And every time Gnome 3 removes some functionality (altough it looks like this time it's optional), a few people cry about it, and a few of those change their DE. That's most of the noise you see here, the rest is people like me, pointing to them and saying "Ha Ha".
Rethinking email
You don't need to paste into the URL bar, you can paste straight into the browser window.
I have removed myself from GNOME several years ago, and for the best. I'll keep the middle button paste, so handy.
It's not a yank. When I yank something I remove it from where it was and *move* it to a new location. It's a copy-paste.
You don't actually use the feature, do you? Try it -- it's the most useful fucking thing ever. Once you get used to it, the windows model of right-click copy, right-click paste is like crossing the street by way of China.
But how does it compare to the Windows model of control-C copy and control-V paste? It does, of course, compare differently in terminal/cmd.exe windows, as control-C and control-V aren't available for that purpose; gnome-terminal and, I think, Konsole work around that by using shift-control-C and shift-control-V. (On OS X, it's command-C and command-V, so that works in Terminal the same way it works elsewhere.)
I.e., if your objection to the Windows model is "you have to use the menu", that's not the case. You do, however, have to use either the menu or the keyboard. You also have to copy to the clipboard, overwriting what's there already; at least some people here have raised that as an objection to the copy/paste model being the only model available.
The Windows UI specs required (I don't know if they still do) that the UI be useable with just a keyboard. It was awkward, but you could do it. That key replaced a previous arcane key combination that gave you access to context menus.
"It's not a yank. When I yank something I remove it from where it was and *move* it to a new location."
With physical items, yes. Digital items are not subject to the same restrictions however. There is no necessity to delete the text from the original location in order to yank it to the new one on a computer.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
On macs back in 1995-1999, I used a program that would provide 10 copy buffers.
I use GNU Screen on all my terminals. Multiple copy buffers, multiple views per terminal/screen & split views too. Sure beats that massive KVM switch with several windows boxes I had in the 90s... Now I use two or three screens GNU/(Windows, Linux|BSD, sometimes MacOS), and Synergy, all on separate hardware (VMs are nice, but nothing beats testing on the metal); Synergy lets me move my mouse & keyinput from one screen to the next, and I can copy on Linux and Paste into Windows without some VNC BS. I do most of my work in the terminal, so I could give a fuck less if Gnome remove every god damned feature, I stopped giving a fuck about WMs in the 90s too. I would take the time to switch to Awesome WM, I guess, but it doesn't matter. All I do is open a terminal maximized and run GNU/Screen in it. I'd go raw terminal mode, but Synergy doesn't support that, and I like to tab over to a browser or image editor every now and again.
(yes GNU/Linux, GNU/BSD, and GNU/Windows: One userland to rule them all -- cross platform porting is "git pull && make")
This. Yet another reason for me to stay with WindowMaker.
Anyone else here miss twm and tvwm? IMVHO Linux Desktop's gotten worse every step since then.
4DWM was one of the few X WM's I've liked even though it had its issues too. Same thing with Xsgi, which made it far less painful for interactive performance in various demanding graphical apps than the competing vendors(HP, Intergraphs pre-NT/2000 systems, IBM, Sun etc...).... HP and Sun were a DRAG to work on if you had any semi-complex geometry, spiking CPU use, while the SGI just chugged along comparatiely spiffy.....
Middle-click to paste has been an integral piece of my workflow for over a decade now, and one of the major bits of discontinuity when I'm working on a more Windows-centric basis. If the GNOME guys want to kill such basic functionality, I'll just keep chugging along using XFCE ... at least until they decide to start pulling this crap.
I actually miss the 3 button mice - I wish that clicking the scroll button on the mouse would be the middle click.
Huh? Last time I checked (about 30 seconds ago), it was. In fact, it has been for as long as I've been using Linux. I even deliberately only buy mouses (mice?) on which the scroll wheel cannot swivel left or right, because that makes it more difficult to press the scroll wheel down without unintended consequences.
An open message to the Gnome Devs: We don't want a new interface! We are happy with our crusty old UI! Don't change it to attract new users, or to imitate Apple or Microsoft's UI's. We use X-Windows and/or Gnome because it is not like either of those platforms. You've already lost the desktop war; don't lose your user base as well through stupid changes. P.S. You don't need to revamp the start menu with each release; we're happy with it as it is as well.
> I just enjoy the simplicity of Windows.
Ok.You are fine with registrations, activation, hunt for drivers, no cross platform compatibility, no apt repositories, no way to update system and apps in one step (optionally using cached packages from another system). But I think you just need more time to evaluate your options.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Just don't force people to hack the source juet to restore the capability.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I'm not getting over anything. Middle-click paste is nice, because it's uniform across applications. CTRL-C / CTRL-V does not (try doing this in a terminal window, where CTRL-C means something else entirely. Now, you have to hold SHIFT as well.) It doesn't hurt anything to keep it, and there's no real reason to get rid of it, so... people, get over it!
sig: sauer
+1.
You're proposing to give a digital operation the name of a physical action to make understanding it easier. "Yank" is a poor choice because it implies moving something, not copying it. It doesn't matter what you can or cannot do.
Absolutely. I've switched back to OpenBSD running Windowmaker to get away from all of the broken abstraction layers I've been having to deal with for several years under other OS's.
Just to prevent as much tedious unnecessary rageposting as I can, here's a mailing list post from one of the developers:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2013-September/msg00065.html
See, this whole story is blown out of thin air. Almost everybody commenting to this Slashdot story have shown themselves to be knee-jerk idiots with no capacity for critical thought. YOU CAN GO HOME NOW. Or better, finally fuck off and forget about all things GNOME. Both you and the GNOME project will be better off this way. Ah well, who am I kidding, this stupid shit has been going on ever since GNOME (and KDE, for its own part) was released.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
"You're proposing to give a digital operation the name of a physical action to make understanding it easier."
No, actually, it's been called that for decades. I was simply informing the previous poster of what it has, indeed, been called.
X has copy and paste operations, but this is a different operation entirely.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
IIUC, XFCE is dependent on Gnome libraries. If Gnome devs take support for something out of their libraries, XFCE will have to work hard to keep the functionality. I believe the same is true of Cinnamon.
Mate (MATE?), OTOH, seems to be derived from the Gnome2 libraries. So if they can be maintained (a big "if" there) it's relatively secure. (They are, of course, dependent on hardware support...and if the Gnome2 libraries need a feature that the other libraries don't need... but that's on the verge of paranoid speculation.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Sorry, let me rephrase: SOMEONE proposed to give a digital operation the name of a physical action to make understanding it easier. "Yank" is a poor choice because it implies moving something, not copying it. It doesn't matter what you can or cannot do.
Better? Your argument trying to justify using "yank" was still based on an irrelevant premise.
The term yank has been used for years by programs not known for their user friendliness. Even then, Google shows up lots of comments on the inaccuracy of the term. Including some speculation that the word was chosen because it happened to start with the letter of an unused key.
A mac doesn't even have a middle mouse button.
Yes it does. The mouse wheel ball is a button.
I use xcfe. Select and middle click for cut and paste works for some programs; not for others. I'm guessing that the programs that it doesn't work with are the ones written with the gnome toolkit.
Thus not only are users that avoid using the gnome desktop still stuck with this stupid convention, but they have do deal wiith an intermittent user interface. They have to learn which programs use it and which don't.
-- hendrik
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is why you should be using KDE, not Gnome. In KDE, you have an applet (it's part of the standard build) called "Klipper"; it's a LIFO buffer of everything you Ctrl-C or highlight. You can then click on the scissors icon in your tool tray to look at the buffer and select something from it, which can then be pasted with ctrl-V or middle-click. The default buffer size is 10 entries, but that can be manually set to whatever value you like.
Thank GOD!! I hate it especially how this causes an entire URL not to be selected in a browser when clicking the URL.
Just because someone may have highlighted some text to middle-click-paste, which they don't want to mess up.
NOT WORTH IT.
Kill it now, kill it with FIRE!
Personal experience says Red Hat/CentOS and Fedora are the most widespread. I know a total of three Ubuntu users (one of which uses awesome instead of Unity), no Mint users, and a very large number of RH/FC users (through their workplace mostly). My friends (who do not share a work place with me) would report a similar statistic.
I have never met in person a Red Hat or Fedora user. Never. I have met a handful of Debian users, a single Gentoo user, and a ton of Ubuntu users (also a single Yellow Dog user years ago, but neither he nor it are around any longer as far as I know). I know several people who use Kubuntu . . . but that's entirely my own influence. If we went by my personal experience we'd conclude that Red Hat and Fedora users are nonexistent. Methinks neither of our personal samples are entirely indicative of worldwide usage . . .
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Wayland supports middle-mouse paste. The clients decide what to do on the click, but they can use the existing drag & drop mechanism to aquire the last selection and paste it.
The real problem with a lot of designers and users is the failure to figure out that middle-mouse-paste is actually an improved version of drag & drop.Too many people think it is a replacement for copy + paste. This is as stupid as if using drag & drop always changed the clipboard to the dragged item.
Ideally selecting something and then middle-click should be EXACTLY the same as dragging that selected item and releasing it at the point that the middle click happened.
That's not quite as fast as ctrl-v or middle click though. If it were super-v followed by F1 through F12, then it might be kind of useful.
The post you linked to said they aren't ONLY planning to remove middle-click paste.
The design document on the Gnome wiki goes into further detail about what they are thinking of doing with middle-click instead.
Another developer in the same thread said this IS the right time to voice objections to removing middle-click yank. It's not out of thin air. Middle-click was already removed, then it was decided to wait on removing it until the new middle click replaces it. The new middle click menu is still being designed.
Yes click-raising is a HUGE problem and the Gnome developers are pretending it isn't.
It is obvious that you cannot do drag & drop if when you press to drag it raises the window that you clicked on. They are currently making HUGE kludges to try to fix this, involving clients having to tell the window manager what areas are drag targets, when the trivial change of not raising the window would work. The client can *RAISE IT'S OWN WINDOW* as I and others have been saying over and over and over and over for perhaps 15 years now, but they refuse to believe that...
Several years ago I used to run my desktop in linux (slackware!). Later distros started to look more and more like windows. Only took a few iterations until I got tired of that crap (seemed all programmers now think like microsoft programmers, !@#$!@#$%%!$%). Now I run linux back-ends and my desktops are OSX, never looked back.
Well whatever you put in the buffer last is still there, so if you're just highlighting and middle-clicking, that still works as normal. Also, you can use the ctrl-C/V and highlight/middle-click buffers separately, just like you've been able to do forever (I just tried it and it still works fine); it's not until you want to go back and look at your buffer history that this changes.
Eh, looks promising, might give it a shot, but frankly, I don't much trust the main gnome folks anymore after the fun that was gnome3 launch.
MATE works, gaining momentum, family members are all happy (and they were not happy with gnome 3 I can tell you that... my poor mom). I don't really have much incentive to switch.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Gnome.
But how does it compare to the Windows model of control-C copy and control-V paste?
It has NOTHING to do with these. Proper applications will make ctrl+c/v work exactly like Windows does, whether or not the user hits the middle mouse button.
The middle-mouse paste is *DRAG AND DROP*. Except you can move windows around, raise them, and even launch applications between the "drag" and the "drop". Everybody (both users and developers) has to get this fact through their thick skulls. Don't call it "middle mouse paste", call it "middle mouse DROP". And any application where the middle mouse click does something different than pushing down on the selection and dragging it and dropping it at the same point is broken.
Why does she not drag & drop the text on Windows?
Yes, change for change's sake. Prove to your boss that you're doing something.
Remember the old saying: if it ain't broke you can at least enhance it.
But how does it compare to the Windows model of control-C copy and control-V paste?
It has NOTHING to do with these. Proper applications will make ctrl+c/v work exactly like Windows does, whether or not the user hits the middle mouse button.
You missed the point of the previous two posts. Somebody appeared to be complaining about the inconvenience of doing copy and paste from the context menu ("the windows model of right-click copy, right-click paste is like crossing the street by way of China"), and I pointed out that the inconvenience of copy-and-paste might be reduced somewhat by using keyboard accelerators for copy and paste.
The middle-mouse paste is *DRAG AND DROP*.
No, it's not, because there's no dragging; it just inserts - pastes, drops, whatever - a selection made elsewhere.
Don't call it "middle mouse paste", call it "middle mouse DROP".
If the problem with "paste" is that people think of "paste" as pasting the clipboard, the problem with "drop" is that people might think of it as dropping something you're dragging. If a term other than "paste" is called for here, I'd use "insert", and continue to add "current selection", i.e. "insert current selection".
It's strange. Before I switched to OSX, I used it all the time in FVWM and found it so useful I even bought a proper 3 button mouse (ie three parallel buttons, none of this scroll-wheel malarky). I wonder if the environments are just too different. That the resulting workflow changed so much that middle-click-paste would've been unnatural.
On the other hand, maybe t's been so long that I've accepted the fact, so I no longer think "that operation would've been so much easier in X)
Plan My Week for iPhone
Shortening words in that way is unnecessary and leads to confusion. Though it does make the writing take on a less formal tone, which could be used to serve a purpose. There are many worse abbreviations in my opinion: In particular, "prolly" - I speak New Zealand english and all of the syllables of "probably" are pronounced (at least by the people I know). Are there any dialects where it is actually pronounced "prolly"? Similarly with "library" - this is often bastardised in speech to "LAI-bry" - missing out one of the syllables. Is shortening words in speech like this due to laziness, poor spelling, a desire to seem trendy, or because that's how the word is spoken by the writer? Either way it's an interesting topic.
Not "yank" or "paste": I think it should be called "drop". In most cases the result is identical to what happens if you dragged the selected text and dropped it at the same point. In fact UI guidelines should define middle-click should act identical to a drag+drop of the most recently selected item (or maybe the most recently selected item that will work at this point as a drop).
What makes you think that it isn't configurable? If you look at the commit diff (linked in the article) you might notice that it is a one line change to disable this functionality. That's because it is a configurable setting; the commit simply changes the default behavior.
https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkSettings.html#GtkSettings--gtk-enable-primary-paste
xcb (the application, not the library) works nicely for multiple buffers.
All your ghosts are just false positives.
Shouldn't that be XFCE's slogan? Something like XFCE: Not Fucking It Up since 1996.
I've only been using it since about 2006, so I can't vouch for any versions before then. Since then it has hasn't given me any headaches and stayed out of my way.
How is the metro interface screwed up? Windows 7 aero causes eye strain for me and found the favorites in the start menu is limited when it comes to adding items and its slow as well when expanding the control panel as a menu. Windows 8, I can add as may items to the metro as I want and resize them as well. The simple and transparent taskbar is a lot easier on the eyes than the aero and uses less resources. On my amd machine running windows 8, i don't get disk trashing like I do in windows 7 which brings my machine to a halt.
"Microsoft taking away the user interface elements that people were used to"
Except windows 95, 2000/xp, and windows 7 menu systems are different from one another.
Having two clipboards is extremely invaluable. It isn't redundant unless you've never exploited it to copy paste two things at the same time.
I doubt it is a Wayland thing. Something this simple can't just come down to the input architecture.
It would take all of 5 minutes to re-add it anyway to Gnome if Wayland removed a part it needed.
Its especially great when you can double/triple click to select a word or a entire line.
From the wording in the article, it seems to suggest that they will be removing the feature entirely in the future.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I've really been wondering why a company doesn't just build something like litestep (basically a module loader and a large collection of modules) and continually beef each shell module's capability.
at my previous job, i was thrown into the deep end and told to make (windows explorer) shell integration for our application. much to my surprise, i found that Explorer is VERY modular. most shell extensions (like the one i was making) just add program X capabilities to the context menu but you can do some hardcore changes to the shell.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I'm pretty sure that anyone who would care about this sort of thing would have abandoned GNOME long ago when they announced with GNOME 3 that they were done with creating functional desktop interfaces and were instead focusing on radical UX/UI research.
That's a nice feature if you like it.
I remember having to disable it so you can close firefox tabs with the middle button, and I relied heavily on middle button scrolling (I still do)
It sounds like you've chosen to completely ignore the design documents on the wiki I referred you to. Okay.
Shocking, I know, but all scroll wheel mice are three button mice. If you click down on that scroll wheel instead of scrolling it, you get the third button click.
But the scroll wheel is usually good as a scroll wheel, but most of them make for a very poor quality mouse button. Half the newer MS mice I've used feature a super-sensitive scroll, and it's almost impossible to click the button without scrolling at the same time. And many of them require more force to generate a click than other mouse buttons, and that's an ergonomic disaster.
Most good mice I've used have a thumb button which I remap to middle-click.
Maybe middle mouse it could be described as "a shortcut for moving the mouse over to where the selection is, drag and drop it back here".
Why should the *client* be raising its own window and messing with the user's view? The user should be in charge of what he sees. The user should have two controls, e.g.: left click to drag, right click to raise.
so, what, is this the tenth or the hundredth shark that Gnome has jumped?
the problem is caused by the commercial battles between redhat and canonical, they both want to dominate the linux market and both are more than willing to cause severe pain and fragmentation to users - and to the linux environment - if it means that they'll end up on top.
RH owns and controls Gnome and systemd.
Canonical owns and controls Unity and upstart.
A lot of the really stupid stuff coming from both of them is deliberate incompatibility to cause problems to the other side, with everyone else (and standards, and interoperability, and compatibility) being collateral damage.
they both deserve to be boycotted.
I keep it installed on my systems as a little reminder to KDE that DEs that start to misbehave too badly can quickly be replaced. :)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
time to switch to kde
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Because I would have to give up Unity and probably Ubuntu. That would be a shame. Two click copy and paste is convenient and fast.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
"But it is confusing for new users, so the ability to middle-click paste was briefly removed from GNOME 3.10."
This is inaccurate in two ways.
One, the change was not made because middle-click paste is 'confusing the new users', though that was cited as an *ancillary factor* in subsequent decision. The change was made due to a plan to use middle click for other functions, and backed out because those other functions weren't ready yet.
Two, the change was not, technically, the 'removal' of the ability to middle-click paste. It was only disabled by default. It could be re-enabled with an xsetting, and gnome-tweak-tool has in fact grown an option to turn it on and off now, if you look at a recent version: this was done specifically to make it easy for people who want to use middle-click paste to turn it back on, at the time when it looked like 3.10 would ship with it turned off.
Thanks, I'll have to try that (I'm using kubuntu). Yet another feature Windows lacks!
Free Martian Whores!
I tried it on my work computer (W7) and it scrolled to the bottom of the screen. Haven't tried it in Linux yet.
Free Martian Whores!
This is why you should be using KDE, not Gnome. In KDE, you have an applet (it's part of the standard build) called "Klipper"; it's a LIFO buffer of everything you Ctrl-C or highlight.
You mean like GNOME Clipboard Manager, from about a decade ago in Gnome 2? Or GPaste, actively-maintained for current Gnome Shell?
So would you rather have to pay twelve independent teams to create versions of your application for Windows, Windows RT, OS X, X11/Linux, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Nintendo 3DS, Wii U, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation Vita, and somehow ensure that all twelve applications behave identically?
Isn't that the one where the whole top of the plastic is a button, and you click by pressing down? Oh wait, that's the Apple Mouse (2006-2009).
Indeed, who cares what features GNOME 3.10 or GNOME 4 has, when GNOME 2 works and is familiar and does everything you need and has an expected lifetime of as long as mint keeps on developing for it.
If I don't like something in Linux, it can usually be changed, which includes the entire desktop. I don't like Gnome, so I use XFCE. I don't like Thunar, so I use Dolphin. I don't like NetworkManager, so I use Wicd. I don't like Geany, so I use Kate. Etc., etc., etc.
They should not change this. This has been standard mouse-interaction behavour on most, if not all, UNIX (and UNIX variants) GUIs, not just GNOME.
left click to drag, right click to raise: That does not match any user interface I have ever seen, and right click often is used to popup a context menu.
Clients are not supposed to just raise their windows for random reasons. And it would not be hard to make the window manager ignore raises that are not immediately after a click. The purpose is to *stop* raises, not create more of them. The reason for clients to raise the window is to provide an obvious and trivial method to *NOT* raise the window. Instead of communicating huge gobs of info to the window manager exactly outlining what areas are non-raising clicks, it just has to not call raise after the click.
Copy and paste in Gnome was always a pain in the ass, they're just making worse, that's all!
GNOME, KDE and Windows desktops were great when they were in catch-up mode (with Mac OS).
Windows peaked at Windows 98 SE; every change since then has been negative; Windows 8 is its death rattle.
KDE peaked with v3.5; I haven't been a regular user of GNOME so I don't know when the rot set in, but it is not the highly usable system that it once was.
I no longer migrate non-technical friends to Linux; I recommend Windows 7 in "Classic" mode, which will not reach its EOL until 2020. For techies I still recommend KDE 4, which I use myself, but I have given up on kmail, which committed suicide when it gave up maildirs and switched to the temperamental Akonadi backend. Please! How do you explain to someone that they need to restart a database before they can read their email?
It is not that all the innovations have been bad; it is that, when a system is close to perfection, most changes will be downhill; and while amateurs can code as well as the professionals, the creative skill needed to imagine a new yet workable GUI/desktop paradigm is exceptionally rare. Therefore, many projects reach feature-completeness, and then commit suicide because their developers feel the need to innovate.
Not a cheap mouse in price but not very well contructed. I say this as a rabid fan too. I can't game properly without mine anymore. Even a G500 gaming mouse is nothing compared to the Naga, what with its piddly 5 or 6 buttons. I have 4 Nagas and everyone of them has some kind of issue and those issues started within the first 6 months of them being new. Because I love the layout so much, I put up with them. Though the Logitech G600 MMO is catching my attention these days and Logitech is usually a damned fine constructed mouse but still matching Razer prices.
Mice have 4 legs, a tail, and fur. Oh, and beady eyes.
The plural of the computer mouse is mouses, not mice.
Why? Because the guy that invented the thing said so.
That way Gnome will end up with the 24 million dumb users that loved Bob and Clippy. Just think!
We can dumb down Linux with just those two little things and grow Linux to be larger than OSX!
For purposes of training everyone that middle click is NOT paste, make the
middle click do "sudo cd / ; rm -rf".
That will teach them real fast!
Which you can also do in Gnome with GPaste.
Watch great movie opening scenes!
The GNOME 3 project seems to do its utmost best to loose the GNOME 2 user base.
I switched to KDE earlier this year after months of trying to deal with the frustration of a combination of broken and removed features.
I wish to congratulate GNOME 3 on their new business, and I know they'll do very well; and good luck -- as best as your interests don't conflict with my interests and I don't have to use that GUI.
Are You Being Facetious? How is clicking the scroll wheel inconvenient? And if it was indeed inconvenient to you, how is the complete removal of the capability an improvement?
I'm guessing he meant that he accidentally middle-clicked when intending to scroll. That means he either has a terrible mouse or he presses down with his whole hand on the scroll wheel. Either way, he probably should have remapped the wheel click to button 0.
i hope, Canonical will patch it out.
If this becomes the case with Gnome, I *ABSOLUTELY* will be removing all Gnome components. Not as a protest against their design decision, but because any Gnome application would be *BREAKING* functionality I use hundreds of times a day. It's time for ALL the Gnome developers to *stop* developing Unix software and go write for MSWindows. Leave their positions for *competent* designers and developrs to work instead. If they want to break things, go break things on MSWin, so that us folks doing *REAL* work can get on with it. And if it's a problem with Wayland, wlll then it's yet ANOTHER reason that Wayland should die _now_. Wayland is starting to look more and more like Obamacare; a severely bad idea that will trash everything in it's path, and will prove impossibe to remove if it's ever allowed to be implented.
I actually wonder what the cry here is anyway. My impression was that there was not many GNOME users in /. anyway, as many of them had jumped the ship a long ago for other reasons.
Mainly because Gnome won't just remove middle-click from Gnome-shell. If they were removing it, it would be from additional apps like Gnome-Terminal, Gedit, etc. And these get used in a lot of environments even if you're running Cinnamon, etc.
We were all new users at some point, yet we leart to use a PC. I didn't know about middle-click-to-paste twenty years ago either.
Why all this crap about "making stuff easier for new users by crapping on old users who already know how to use a PC"? Just exaplain what a each of the THREE buttons on a mouse are for to new users and the problem is solved!
You could have copied [to your clipboard] what you wanted to paste into the URL bar and pasted using rightclick->paste. There, simple. AND middle-click-to-paste would not affect you in any way.
I believe the idea was that Wayland was not supposed to be an operating system running on top of an operating system the same way like X11 or Windows 3.11 were. ;-) It's not about removing functionality but rather about moving it somewhere where it belongs. It's the same as with font rendering: having I/O privileged code running a complex text layout engine and a font rasterizer probably is not a good idea, which is why not even X11 supports advanced text services in the X process - client applications are supposed to handle it, for example Gtk+ uses Pango. If some functionality has to be shared among multiple applications (and even toolkits), the first place to look for it ought to be a shared library used by all the clients, and NOT putting it into the process that handles high-performance composition using privileged HW access. (My understanding of the issues involved is pretty limited, but I believe I got the gist of it.)
Ezekiel 23:20
In any case, even if the option is removed at the Window-manager level, then it can certainly be re-introduced at the application level, and probably at the driver level. So, "MEH^2".
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Actually, I was referring to tablet centric design in general, metro, unity as well as gnome 3. It's all geared to a touch screen. I do not use a touch screen all the time or even the majority of the time. Programming, or even writing an email. GIVE ME MY KEYBOARD! I need BUTTONS to type fast. I have a couple devices that do have a touch screen. And for those devices, great. The touch is nice, gestures, good stuff. But they exist to get around the basic problem of one finger touching the screen, or two. But at some point, you can not have as many combinations as my mouse with three buttons and a VERY HANDY scroll wheel. Nevermind a keyboard. Which is fine, when you realize that you not going to do everything you do on a desktop on a tablet. *Yes*, technically you can write two page emails, or even this long winded reply on an iPhone. But it is not the easiest way to do it. It is not even a close call. When I am on my 22" desktop. Gesturing with my mouse, or parsing through comical sized icons is *not* my preferred method. Swiping to unlock on a 4.5" screen. Okay, what ever, but @ 1900x1200. ef off! In this area, MS at least stepped back and said. Whoa! Did a bit of a head shake and rolled back. While GNOME (who I was really targeting, not MS, but I understand the sensitivity) decides, even given the the facts of recent history go the other way. It seems that their philosophy is, if you can't make a touch analog, dump it. So I feel they have turned their backs on people like me, people who use a desktop. We don't count. I remember when GNOME started, how it extended the GTK, I loved it. Now it's yet another touch screen OS. Not that I long for the early does, not at all, GNOME 2 was great much better than the first GNOME release. (Too bad they didn't fork it). That said, because of Gnome 3 and Unity I was forced to look around again. I hadn't experimented with window managers for a long time, not since the dot com crash!
Seriously, they can have my middle mouse button paste when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
And my middle finger, too!
I liked the hunt for drivers (hardly needed those days). Just downloading and installing a driver is nice, instead of installing a whole new distro version.
Cross platform compatibility is very simple, you download a setup.exe for gimp or scribus or whatever and run it. There are solutions for more complicated stuff.
Regarding updating, I think there's WSUS (but needs a windows server, which is too expensive), Autopatcher (freeware), else for apps well you can let the vendor updater processes run (I'm not bothered by some java updater thing using 0.01% CPU in a while) or there are 3rd party tools again.
Still, I use linux, to eat my own dog foot (I push it to friends, acquaintances because of the security and because it's hard to fuck up by clicking around, and also giving it away is legal). I'd be probably more happy with Windows 8.1, I'm missing on the games and freeware. Except for the reboots, and I'm peeved the old classic UI was sacked.