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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.
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.
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!
Or, you know, clicking the scroll wheel
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."
I use this all the time by clicking the scroll wheel. Doesn't feel inconvenient at all since I'm used to using the scroll wheel while browsing and such anyway
Also, what prevents you from ignoring it if you don't like it?
Are you sure you want to go with NT though? I heard that Windows 98 is better for games.....
My mac only has one button, you insensitive clod!
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.
Apparently to allow contextual menus.
Personally, I thought that was what the right mouse button was for, but what do I know about how to use a computer? I'm just a user.
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.
As much as i applaud Apple for finding homes for physically challenged mice, that doesn't mean the rest of the mice should have to wear sandbags.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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'
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually Apple OSX Terminal.app has middle-click paste... Oh, joy!
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 +
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?!
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.
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 +
Many modern mouses make it hard to click the middle button without scrolling a notch with the wheel at the same time. Incredibly annoying.
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
A lot of devices become incredibly annoying with Jim Beam hand.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Stop buying cheap mice then? All the mice I've bought over the last 5 years have all had great scroll wheel clickers.
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.
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. . . .
...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.
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.
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"'
>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."
He wasn't. I don't use Linux and it struck me as a mouse-wheel click. Don't be pompous.
By the way, i've never heard L+R called a third button click.
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...
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.
I remember this effect the first few times I used a wheel mouse. It didn't take long to learn to press in a certain way (angle) so there's no scrolling. Is there something in more recent mice that makes this harder?
I know what you mean. I also could find the certain angle in which to click the button in older mice, but there really seems to be something in the more recent mice that makes this harder. Could be that the scroll wheel is positioned higher, that is one guess.
<rant>Every year, we seem to have fewer keys on the keyboard and more widgets on the mouse. For example, on most laptops we've lost PgUp/Dn keys and the arrow keys keep shrinking, probably because a wheel mouse is supposed to do the same thing. I predict that some day they don't sell keyboards any more, but a typical mouse will have 102 buttons.</rant>
The Ducky Mini is an interesting case as it omits arrow keys completely.
What are the rules for "current selection"? Does it include any echo of most recently, but not now highlighted? Highlighted in a windows that is the the active window?
rules:
In general any selectable text in any window is good (though there are very very few exceptions and they annoy the fuck out of you when they don't work. Code::blocks, I'm looking at you).
Source must exist when middleclick-paste takes place, so you can't deselect (i think) or close before pasting somewhere else. Clipboard managers modify default behavior and add more persistence to the copied content.
Voila.
If you want to understand how these buffers work, install xsel and use xsel -po/-so/-bo to print out contents of primary/secondary/clipboard buffer while toying with highlight-middleclick paste and/or ctrl C/ctrl V (ctrl+shift+C/ctrl+shift+V in case of terminal).
You can even put your own things there with xsel -pi/-si/-bi which allows for nifty hacks like 'i want to press a hotkey and have it automagically load a contents of a given text file to the buffer so i can paste shit left and right'. With xdotool you can achieve automagical paste too, eg send paste signal to the system with xdotool key ctrl+v or xdotool click 2.
1. It's not rocket science to figure out and it's very convenient so stop whining and harness the power of this feature
2. Somehow windows users have no problem with different GUI when poking their android smartphones so why do their switch their flexibility muscle off when seeing desktop linux?
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")
Linux never was UNIX. It never got certified. If you're really wanting a UNIX OS for free, you're wanting FreeBSD/OpenBSD/PC-BSD
...which haven't been certified, either.
Linux has always been the wild west when it comes to standards.
But, as at least one snarky reply hints, this has nothing to do with "Linux", it has to do with GNOME; GNOME will be as {pick one of "wonderful", "sucky", "not too bad", "mediocre", "better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick", etc.} on FreeBSD/OpenBSD/PC-BSD/etc. as it will be on Linux in this case.
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.
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.
I have never met in person a Red Hat or Fedora user.
So you've never met Linux corporate users? There's a lot of RHEL stuff in those circles.