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Gnome dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger
- malfist 10mo agoOne person opening a merge request does not signify gnome giving the middle finger to people. Especially since its not merged
- inyourtenement 10mo agoThe headline says “Gnome dev” not just “Gnome”.
- cdrini 10mo agoYeah, but the lead makes it seem like an organisational decision: > Ever since Linux got a graphical desktop, you could middle-click to paste – but if GNOME gets its way, that's going away soon, and from Firefox too. But who knows, maybe it is a team decision, I don't know the internals or Jordan Petridis' role outside of "gnome dev".
- toenail 10mo agoGnome devs always had the attitude that they decide for the users, nothing to see here.
- ChocolateGod 10mo agoStop using your computer wrong
- bradley_taunt 10mo agoJust avoid GNOME altogether. Complete mess in general.
- lelanthran 10mo agoSeconded. They are designing for a theoretical user that does not exist.
- tuyiown 10mo agoI not sure if I should be relieved or worried about my newfound non-existence.
- _fat_santa 10mo agoFor all of GNOME's faults, it's provided me a much better experience than other DE's. XFCE and others don't handle fractional scaling nearly as gracefully as GNOME does. KDE is probably the closest but you still have the issue of running GTK/QT apps and they all look very different and jarring on the desktop.
- w4rh4wk5 10mo agoThe introduction of hamburger menus broken many of the Alt+Letter shortcut workflows. Even to this day, GNOME applications are hard to fully control via keyboard. I'll never understand how this can be deemed acceptable from an accessibility standpoint.
- reddalo 10mo agoI also think that the absence of a title bar is so much annoying. They wanted to copy macOS, but macOS somehow used to do it better (at least before Tahoe).
- MarkusWandel 10mo agoUnix oldtimer here (first exposure: 1987). A lot of copy/pasting is at the shell prompt. Aside from being super lightweight - just select something in previous output, e.g. a file path, middle click, and done - what about the key bindings? All the world uses ^C for copy, but that already does something conflicting at the Unix shell prompt. I have to admit that I do feel like an oldtimer though. What I do at the shell prompt, others do in VS Code, and probably 10x faster once they're good at the GUI. So maybe super-lightweight copy/paste at the shell prompt just doesn't matter that much any more.
- necrotic_comp 10mo agoTangential - what do people do faster in vscode than on the terminal ?
- MarkusWandel 10mo agoThe whole "integrated development" experience. Take it or leave it, but old farts like me go all the way back to poring over code on printouts since your only window into it was one file at a time in an 80x25 terminal - not terminal window, actual terminal or, by then, terminal emulator. That does affect later habits like, for example, hating the information overload from syntax highlighting. And don't even get me started on auto-indent. Whereas younger colleagues, whose habits were formed in the era of much more sophisticated tools, have dozens of files open in tabs and can follow, say, a "where is this defined" or "where is this driven" (this is RTL code, not normal software) in an instant. Keep in mind some oldtimers had really fancy emacs setups that could do that, and vi users had things like ctags.
- antonvs 10mo agoThey imagine that they're being more efficient.
- jeffjeffbear 10mo agoThat is also the one good thing about Window's commandline, you use right click there to copy and paste which is nice. The rest sucks.
- _fat_santa 10mo agoThe article makes it seem worse than it really is. All they seem to be doing is moving that functionality from being the default to an option that you enable. Personally I heavily rely on the middle click to paste, especially with my docker workflows. Rather than having to click "CTRL+SHIFT+C" then "CTRL+SHIFT+V" every time, I just know whatever is highlighted will get pasted when I hit the middle click button. It's a subtle difference that saves maybe 1-2 seconds but combine that over the course of months and all of a sudden I've saved myself an hour with more efficient copy/paste.
- jalk 10mo agoI have it the opposite way. Moving my right hand from the keyboard to the mouse doesn’t save me time - so as with most things: YMMV
- _fat_santa 10mo agoIf you're using something like vim or emacs then yeah I would agree with you but for something like docker commands, there's just no easy way to copy a specific container ID without using the mouse (if there is let me know lol). My logic is if your hand is already on the mouse, it's going to be faster to paste with a mouse than your keyboard.
- vladvasiliu 10mo ago> for something like docker commands, there's just no easy way to copy a specific container ID without using the mouse Some terminals have a mode where you can move the cursor around the history, and allow searching / copying / pasting. Alacritty and tmux come to mind, others may also implement something similar.
- WD-42 10mo agoIt’s still annoying to move. The only way it’s practical is if you can store a regex to match container ids or whatever, and quickly fetch it
- internet_points 10mo agosomeone opened an issue. must be a slow news day.
- dilap 10mo agoHaven't used Linux in forever, but middle-click to paste was like the one thing that consistently worked everywhere. So it makes some sense that someone want to break it somewhere. With enough fingers meddling all conventions are broken. Wisdom of the crowds. Democracy. (Actually I have been playing with Omarchy recently a tiny bit, inspired by the absolutely devestatingly bad macOS update. Initial tire-kicking was very positive. They had a "universal copy-paste" feature that still seemed WIP at the time...i.e. didn't work everywhere...)
- jeffjeffbear 10mo ago> Haven't used Linux in forever, but middle-click to paste was like the one thing that consistently worked everywhere. That's because it was an X11 thing, and everyone used X11.
- AshamedCaptain 10mo agoX11 doesnt really define those things. Policy, not mechanism.
- bluGill 10mo agoWhile X11 didn't define it, the defaults were such that it would be harder to write a program that didn't do that then one that did in many cases.
- AshamedCaptain 10mo agoNot at all. Unless you specifically coded this handler for the middle button and wrote code for fetching selections and all, you would not get this behavior. It would be easier for the middle button to do nothing. You may be thinking of toolkits like Gtk+ or Qt which implement this behavior, but it is really just a convention shared by many desktop toolkits rather than anything defined by X11.
- kevin_thibedeau 10mo agoX heavily relied on the primary and secondary selections for performing operations in lieu of an explicit clipboard. It is built into the protocol. The only policy is where that paste binding defaulted to.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Y_Y 10mo ago> Feature I don't use must be removed! I unsupportedly claim that it is bad, and will zealously advocate for changing it. It's existed for a long time, but I shan't acknowlege why! Why are people like this? Will Gnome reach apotheosis when they have removed all buttons and boxes and you just get a shiny rounded rectangle to admire?
- HugoTea 10mo agoI've always hated middle-click-paste, but trying to turn it off quickly rears a bigger issue, it's somehow deeply embedded in Linux, disabling it in Gnome would leave it enabled in other places like FireFox, which leads to searching how to disable it, which leads to recompiling the kernel, at least that's the rabbit hole I went down last time. I have no opinion on whether it should be default or not, but I wish it was easier to control globally.
- seanhunter 10mo agoWut? Recompiling the kernel is absolutely not required for changing the behaviour of middle mouse paste.
- nottorp 10mo agoWell it's Gnome, next step is to remove right click. They will first make the proposal as a tik tok video, since they seem to avoid anything that will speed up interaction, like reading or having sooo many buttons on your input devices.
- bigbadfeline 10mo ago> Well it's Gnome, next step is to remove right click. Remove Gnome ASAP because after they remove your ability to control anything on your computer you won't be able to remove it anymore.
- vemv 10mo agoAs of lately I was thinking, with AI coding I could pick a distro of choice, and tweak it at will in all aspects. Not that it wasn't possible before of course, but OS/distro dev across the entire stack surely spans an insane breadth and depth of knowledge.
- antonvs 10mo agoSince the advent of LLMs, I've used them to juice up my Linux setup significantly. I was already using Ubuntu with Gnome (the "flashback" version) and the XMonad tiling WM, but I've since ditched Gnome and switched to LXQt, and am pretty happy with it. Then I installed Nix to override Ubuntu's aggressive Snap usage for applications like Firefox. (You can try to install it some other way, it'll just silently revert no matter how hard you try to configure it not to.) Next step will be to eliminate Ubuntu entirely, because it's so focused on "end user" friendliness, it creates a terrible experience for anyone trying to customize their setup. I'm very aware that I'm moving further and further off the "mainstream", but if the mainstream means "you will accept all our poorly thought-out and inefficient UI decisions", then there's not really a downside to that.
- greatgib 10mo agoThis is one of the toppest things in Linux desktop. I agree that it can be teached more widely but then it is so fucking convenient, I think that 4/5 of my need of copy-paste are efficiently done like this. Gnome has really this problem of young crappy devs that want to make a name by themselves by "breaking" something, like Google style. If they can't disrupt, then there is no fame. And I would easily guess that this guy is running is Linux-gnome desktop from a MacBook... Remind me when the idiots currently in charge at Ubuntu suddenly decided to put the closing buttons for windows in the upper left corner to mimic OSX. They knew better... then it was the beginning of the downfall for Ubuntu that no sane person will use anymore.
- sliken 10mo agoSimilarly gnome-terminal used to have "new terminal" as the first option in the menu of a terminal. Then it got moved down to 6th item, then in the newer versions removed completely. Very frustrating.
- juancn 10mo agoFor me it always felt weird, it surprises me that it survived on-by-default for this long. It's one of those remnants of ancient UX, like focus on hover.
- ndiddy 10mo agoFrom the MR comments: > If we assume the Linux desktop has 4% market share, and assume the highly improbable fact that all of those 4% know how to use middle click paste and prefer it over the alternative autoscrolling, that's still 96% of users that are used to environments where autoscrolling is available and middle click paste doesn't exist I don't know why they're using familiarity as an argument when GNOME has intentionally behaved completely differently from the Windows/Mac desktop for the past 15 years. I'm sure that having to launch software by clicking an unlabelled button on the top-left of the screen and then clicking the dots in the dock that appears on the bottom, or not having a visible overview of the windows onscreen without switching to fullscreen "activities mode", or not having any application status icons, or not being able to minimize windows, all cause more user confusion than middle click paste. Of course all of this is completely fine. It's great that people are trying out new ways to use a computer, and I'm sure that there's lots of people that prefer the GNOME workflow. It's just that when you already have to re-learn how to use a desktop in order to use GNOME, I don't see the point in acting like middle click paste is a step too far. Edit: I also saw an interesting point made by a KDE developer on the Linux Reddit board: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1q4viq9/disable_primarypaste_by_default_gnome/nxwb8gn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1q4viq9/disable_prim... > Having an option is fine; we do in Plasma. They can have any default they want too, I don't care. > What's bad is this MR doing it at a GTK level. It's that lack of even thinking about what inconsistencies that would cause for GTK apps running anywhere outside gnome and other toolkits running on Gnome that comes across quite badly. > gsettings-desktop-schemas will be pulled in [on other desktops] as it's a reverse dep of many other things, including xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, which is required for use on all desktops to avoid having messed up GTK fonts in your flatpak apps.
- Hizonner 10mo agoWait, so it's important to be "familiar" to the 96 percent of users who don't use your software?
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- ChrisArchitect 10mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46513010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46513010
- mid-kid 10mo agoYou can tell someone was angry by how often they wrote [sic] in the quotes