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> Most people get confused by the fact that there is more than one "clipboardy thing". They copy to one, and then paste from the other and wine when the operati

> Most people get confused by the fact that there is more than one "clipboardy thing". They copy to one, and then paste from the other and wine when the operation fail. Let's not blame the (l)users. For example, by merely selecting the text you want to replace you may override the paste buffer content - this is a blatant POLA[1] violation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...

xenomachina 8y ago
> Let's not blame the (l)users. I don't think stating that "people get confused" is placing blame on one party or the other. That they get confused is a fact. I said nothing about whose fault that is. > For example, by merely selecting the text you want to replace you may override the paste buffer content It's a trade-off. Having the mere act of selecting text copy it to the primary selection is extremely convenient. There isn't any way to have that convenience without the downside that overwriting it is also easy. If you want to copy something and not have further selections overwrite it, you use the clipboard. This is like the trade-off of having a confirmation dialog or not. I wouldn't say "this is a blatant POLA violation". What surprises one person might seem obvious to another. There is only one intuitive user interface, everything else is learned. The confusion starts with the fact that people typically aren't told that the primary selection and the clipboard are two separate things (and by using the term "paste buffer" to ambiguously refer to one of them you're perpetuating this). Much of this misconception comes from the fact that more popular systems (Windows and Mac) only have the one clipboard, and people assume that whatever they learned first is universally true. Not knowing about the primary selection actually isn't a problem on its own, though. After all, if one only knows about the clipboard operations, but doesn't ever trigger pasting from the primary selection, then the fact that the primary selection even exists would be invisible to them. The clipboard selection on X works pretty much the same as the clipboard on other systems. The real problems start when people who believe there is only one "paste buffer" are then told, or discover, that they can "paste" using operations that actually paste from the primary selection rather than the clipboard. The worst part is that this doesn't fail outright, but instead seems to work, but inconsistently. Now they're confused, because there is no way to reconcile this behavior with their mental model that "this is another way to paste from the one and only clipboard".

xenomachina 8y ago

> Let's not blame the (l)users. I don't think stating that "people get confused" is placing blame on one party or the other. That they get confused is a fact. I said nothing about whose fault that is. > For example, by merely selecting the text you want to replace you may override the paste buffer content It's a trade-off. Having the mere act of selecting text copy it to the primary selection is extremely convenient. There isn't any way to have that convenience without the downside that overwriting it is also easy. If you want to copy something and not have further selections overwrite it, you use the clipboard. This is like the trade-off of having a confirmation dialog or not. I wouldn't say "this is a blatant POLA violation". What surprises one person might seem obvious to another. There is only one intuitive user interface, everything else is learned. The confusion starts with the fact that people typically aren't told that the primary selection and the clipboard are two separate things (and by using the term "paste buffer" to ambiguously refer to one of them you're perpetuating this). Much of this misconception comes from the fact that more popular systems (Windows and Mac) only have the one clipboard, and people assume that whatever they learned first is universally true. Not knowing about the primary selection actually isn't a problem on its own, though. After all, if one only knows about the clipboard operations, but doesn't ever trigger pasting from the primary selection, then the fact that the primary selection even exists would be invisible to them. The clipboard selection on X works pretty much the same as the clipboard on other systems. The real problems start when people who believe there is only one "paste buffer" are then told, or discover, that they can "paste" using operations that actually paste from the primary selection rather than the clipboard. The worst part is that this doesn't fail outright, but instead seems to work, but inconsistently. Now they're confused, because there is no way to reconcile this behavior with their mental model that "this is another way to paste from the one and only clipboard".