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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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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."
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.
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.....
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.
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 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 selection buffer and the clipboard are two entirely different things. Selecting text does not screw up the clipboard accessed with ctrl-c/ctrl-v.
I too highlight words all the time. Constantly. Not only to keep track of where I am, but just to fidget. I've never encountered a problem with unwanted text in the clipboard.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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
That's why I switched to XFCE when GNOME 3 was released. I know what I'm doing thank you! Lowest common denominator design will lead to a low quality production.
It's been configurable in KDE since forever. Together with "focus follow mouse", another X-izm. And it's confusing no for "new users" but for "users coming from Windows background"
Windows 8 does have a start menu, it's just takes up the whole screen.
In windows 7 explorer, pressing 'alt' will give you the old menus back - and the toolbars were moved to the start menu.
No idea where they went in WIndows 8. My experience with windows 8 primarily involved getting a refund.
Diana Moon Glampers as a UX designer. That explains a lot, actually.
I miss the days when it was UI - the user's interface with the computer. An interface. The thing that makes it possible to make the computer do what you want it to do. Design it for maximum functionality with minimal interference.
Somewhere along the line it became UX - the experience. The fluff. The marketing. Doesn't matter if it's functional or not as long as it feels good. You're not allowed to learn anything, you're not allowed to even know how it works. There's nothing to master. Just one button that says "Make it look like whatever the other UX people think is fashionable this year."
In Windows-land, we lost (unless you hack the registry) focus-follows-mouse from XP to 7, and the ability to resize an arbitrary number of windows when we went from 7 to Metro. In Web-land, we lost Firefox. In GNOME-land, we're about to lose middle-click-to-paste. (I probably shouldn't have mentioned focus-follows-mouse, or they'll take that too.)
First they hide the feature. They they claim telemetry says nobody uses it. Then they take it away. (Never mind the fact that the sort of user who does use the feature either delays the upgrade, hacks around the limitation, and is likely to pre-emptively disable telemetry as a matter of course.)
We used to be Emperors and Empresses over our machines. Now that any fool can design a UX, we have UIs designed by fools for fools. It's all kind of mixed up in my mind, but the past five years of change for change's sake have been a doozy.
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?!
CTRL+ALT++ or - were NOT to zoom in or out. Those keystrokes switched between desktop resolutions.
They switched between display resolutions, without affecting the desktop resolution. If you had a 1600x1200 desktop and hit CTRL-ALT-+ to get 1024x768, it would display a subset of your large desktop, just larger. You could pan around the large desktop as needed. It was, in effect, a zoom.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Exactly. The user-to-user interface, such as English, is so complex that no-one can ever learn 100% of a language, and the benefit of that is that it enormously powerful.
If we wanted interfaces that were so simple you could learn the whole thing in two weeks, we'd all be speaking in baby talk. What people want is an interface where you can learn the BASICS quickly, then keep learning more forever.
When you dumb down the interface, you're choosing to make the first two months of use easier, at the expense of making the next 20 years of use more difficult.
That's dumb X 120.
You sir, sound like you are expecting an answer from reasonable people.
The GNOME 3 devs have a better than 3 year track record of showing that they are NOT reasonable people. No screen savers, no-left pane in a file manager, or being able to blank your screen instead of sleeping when you close the lid on your laptop. These are features that have been removed with no way to add the functionality back in (xscreensaver and moving to Nemo don't count). These are not the decisions of reasonable people. They have shut the door on these features, and if someone finds a way to hack them in, they then remove the backdoors that allow for that. They are damn serious about making this stuff go away and in their arrogance and hubris believe that they know better than you what you want and need to be productive in a desktop environment.
vi +
Many modern mouses make it hard to click the middle button without scrolling a notch with the wheel at the same time. Incredibly annoying.
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.
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"'
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...
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.