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I'm just trying to help your "obliterated ... by a wayward mouse action" problem. As I said at the end of the post, the actual behavior of some X Window System

by pdkl95 6y ago

I'm just trying to help your "obliterated ... by a wayward mouse action" problem. As I said at the end of the post, the actual behavior of some X Window System features are poorly explained and not obvious. The unexplained differences from the de fact standard behavior new users expect is as major usability problem. However... > utterly trivial and intuitive on every other major operating system It's worth remembering that when the standards document referenced in my previous [1] was originally written... a lot of those "major operating systems" didn't exist. In 1987, MS Windows was on version 1.0. I'm not sure it even supported any clipboard-like features. In that era, minimizing memory usage and network traffic were important, design goals. > intuitive "The only 'intuitive' interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned." -- Bruce Ediger, on X interfaces (ref: /usr/share/fortune/linux)

stouset 6y ago
> I'm just trying to help your "obliterated ... by a wayward mouse action" problem. That's fine and I do appreciate the information, but from the perspective of the overall discussion I think the point stands that the X approach to this is completely broken from a user perspective. > It's worth remembering that when the standards document referenced in my previous [1] was originally written... a lot of those "major operating systems" didn't exist. That's completely understandable, but we've had over thirty years to adapt. This argument is the same one that keeps Emacs greybeards defending M-k and M-y despite the fact that there hasn't been a Meta key on a single keyboard I've used in my 30 years of computing. At some point you have to accept that the rest of the computing world has agreed upon a different standard than yours, and you either need to take steps to accommodate that or die. That's not to say you can't try out new things while still abiding by existing standards (for instance, with advanced features like pastebuffer history), but that's completely different from clinging on to inferior historical approaches when everyone else has moved on.

by pdkl95 6y ago

stouset 6y ago

> I'm just trying to help your "obliterated ... by a wayward mouse action" problem. That's fine and I do appreciate the information, but from the perspective of the overall discussion I think the point stands that the X approach to this is completely broken from a user perspective. > It's worth remembering that when the standards document referenced in my previous [1] was originally written... a lot of those "major operating systems" didn't exist. That's completely understandable, but we've had over thirty years to adapt. This argument is the same one that keeps Emacs greybeards defending M-k and M-y despite the fact that there hasn't been a Meta key on a single keyboard I've used in my 30 years of computing. At some point you have to accept that the rest of the computing world has agreed upon a different standard than yours, and you either need to take steps to accommodate that or die. That's not to say you can't try out new things while still abiding by existing standards (for instance, with advanced features like pastebuffer history), but that's completely different from clinging on to inferior historical approaches when everyone else has moved on.