7 ms·

GNOME Disabling Middle Click Paste

47 points by alrs 13y ago

angersock 13y ago
Really? What a bunch of jerks--hasn't this been standard behavior for quite some time?
- angersock 13y ago
  More details here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665193 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665193 Sometwhat telling: (In reply to comment #2) > Breaking a default that has been in X forever is not desirable. In this case, > it is a good default. Leave it alone. Bastien, please do not do this. Disabling broken behaviour by default is a good thing. It would be a GTK+ specific XSetting, which would only be disabled by default based on your XSettings manager. If you use gnome-settings-daemon, then it would be disabled by default. The people that paste their passwords to IRC will thank us. Literally everyone in the bug thread is like "Please, don't do this/why would you do this?" and Bastien is like "nope nope better for the users hush". What a bunch of tools.
  - dalai 13y ago
    A reply by a Gnome dev to an older bug (536271) about this is even more telling: I would even go as far as to disable middle mouse paste without exposing any GUI option for this [...] A hardcore unix person will shout and scream if we try to remove it, yet it is flawed. We should remove it and use a one, predictable way of copy & pasting.
    - keithpeter 13y ago
      c.f Jef Raskin's idea of the 'monotonous' interface, i.e. an interface in which common actions could be performed in one way only, and that one way could be predicted from context reliably. He thought that the result would be an interface that is easy to learn quickly. And that raises the old issue of 'experts' with the interface wanting more control. I actually like Gnome Shell, but I can see how a decision making process that depends on what one developer thinks is good for users may have problems in the longer term...
      - rrmm 13y ago
        The devs seem like they're on some sort of holy war to purify the gui. The problem is that interface design (like anything else) is about trade-offs. GNOME needs some folks that have been through this cycle and understand it.
raphinou 13y ago
The middle click to paste is one of the great features I use continuously, and often show to windows users who find it useful too.
dlsym 13y ago
Sometimes I get the feeling that there are only idiots or assholes working on gnome :-/ It all started with this whole: "Yeah - let's dumb it all down."-movement. "Improvements" like these are just disgusting. (Edit: This falls into the same category of great ideas like the "spatial nautilus".)
- brokenparser 13y ago
  I liked spatial nautilus, it endorsed KISS. Other operating systems that had the same basic interface include classic Mac OS and Windows 95. Both of them were easy to use as well (until they crashed) though the latter messed up by having a virtual desktop folder become the root of a tree with more virtual folders that didn't have anything to do with filesystems (they kept going downhill ever since).
kbuck 13y ago
This change was backed out: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-settings-daemon/commit/plugins/xsettings/gsd-xsettings-manager.c?id=e204eddcdbfb9f8d722355fab1643330c7d10c25 https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-settings-daemon/commit/pl...
- dlsym 13y ago
  Great. They "defered this change until the next cycle."
- angersock 13y ago
  Yay! Now I'm just looking forward to the update where this is quietly reinserted and things start acting weird.
- parley 13y ago
  However, the comment for re-enabling middle click paste seems to indicate that it will indeed be removed in the future: "We're not really ready for this change, and we haven't messaged it properly. After discussion with Allan Day and Jakup Steiner, we'll defer this change until the next cycle."
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    A free/open source project that worries about 'messaging'? Has something gone wrong? As others have commented, I've always found that having two copy paste processes cause a slight mental pause sometimes. I tend to use middle drag middle click paste in terminal applications and the drag to highlight, select edit/copy then click in desired position, select edit/paste for graphical applications. Interesting to see how this pans out. Gnome has significant contributions from Red Hat staff. Red Hat have suggested they will be releasing the desktop RHEL7 with Gnome Classic as the default UI to minimise training costs for customers.[1] [1] http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Red-Hat-confirms-GNOME-Classic-Mode-for-RHEL-7-1887469.html http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Red-Hat-confirms-GNOM...
kragniz 13y ago
Although this particular feature isn't going to affect me, since I'm primarily a touchpad user, I'm not a fan of the path they're going with imitating iOS-style selection handles. Sure, they can be useful if you only have a touchscreen, but seem to always look ugly and feel awkward to use.
doe88 13y ago
I would say this is the one feature I miss the most on OS X, copy just by selecting text and paste with middle click.
- RBerenguel 13y ago
  I think you can add this with BetterTouchTool. At least I managed to add an almost plumbing rule with middle clicking on my old MB, I have to try it on the new, though
AlexanderDhoore 13y ago
Here's a pretty truthful evaluation of the direction Gnome is going, by the smart, geeky folks from the Linux Action Show: (Just watch 20 seconds... you'll get it) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Z8Kz27PC3_E#t=1593 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Z8K...
- brokenparser 13y ago
  Skip to 26:11
Afal 13y ago
GNOME 4 will be just one button that makes fart noises when you press it
- vacri 13y ago
  In 4.1 they'll remove the fart noise, because 'not everyone will have sound hooked up, and we want to provide a consistent experience'...
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Silent ... but deadly. Yeah, that's GNOME in a nutshell.
  - brokenparser 13y ago
    In 4.2 they'll have the button press itself after a time-out unless you cancel it, because the user might forget to press it.
- sameerds 13y ago
  I have a great suggestion for the GNOME desktop: Disable leftward movement of the mouse. Moving left is for losers. Real users only move right, and keep going right until the mouse pointer warps around to the left edge of the screen. Then we can use the "move left" gesture to open up a "motion context menu", where it can show options such as "Move to workspace", or "Move to KDE" and so on.
VMG 13y ago
I'm curious to see how this plays out. The X default with two clipboards is insane, but I think the best option is to merge those into one and keep the middle click. The design docs: https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/Selections https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/Selections
- silon3 13y ago
  Agreed. I could live with this change, too. To bad gnome shell ruined gnome usability in other ways, so it's no longer relevant.
  - username42 13y ago
    I am curious of your grief against gnome shell. Since Ubuntu has switched to unity, I have lost a lot of time to find an alternative. I am satisfied with Ubuntu-Gnome that I have installed on the computer of my father. I intend to switch all my computers to Ubuntu-Gnome. Maybe you have found issues that could annoys me also.
- cs02rm0 13y ago
  If you merge them won't you either lose the highlight-copy or have the highlight-copy throw out your explicitly copied text? I like having the two separate, that would be a retrograde step as far as I'm concerned.
- vacri 13y ago
  When I moved from Windows to Linux, the addition of the 'selection' clipboard was the easiest change, and quickest to pick up. It's really not hard. You have the same ctrl-c-v clipboard as always. In addition to that, there is another clipboard for the last selected item, deliverable with a middle click. It's a good feature, not a wart.
bifrost 13y ago
Guess I'm glad I don't use this stuff. WTH. My productivity would slow to a crawl if I couldn't middlebutton paste. Maybe they could work on something useful, like fixing memory leaks or making it not hugely bloated?
jsnell 13y ago
I dislike the UX changes done in Gnome 3 as much as anyone, and middle-click paste is firmly wedged in my muscle memory. But this is actually a change that's justifiable, unlike the general change for change's sake. Having two completely separate mechanisms for copy-paste (not talking about the UI, but the underlying clipboard/selection) genuinely is confusing. It's never consistent across applications. Will I be able to middle-click paste from this web browser to that terminal, or from this emacs to that Skype window? Or do I need to select + Ctrl-Insert in this terminal to copy to that other window. Pretty much no way to know without learning it by trial and error. After almost two decades of using X I'm still surprised weekly about pasting the wrong thing due to this stuff. (And any time I paste text to an IRC terminal, I make sure to paste it to a throwaway window first to verify I've really got the right content). And really, while I will continuously use select + middle-click to copy, it's only because of muscle memory. It's not some huge productivity boost over using the keyboard shortcuts. And once it stops working, the muscle memory can easily be retrained. (Remember how you probably complained when browsers stopped treating middle-click with an url in the selection as "open url"? I have no trouble admitting that I whined like hell about the massive loss in productivity it'd cause me. A month later I didn't particularly miss it, because I was automatically using a different workflow.) The primary selection is a ridiculous vestige. Good riddance. I'm less enthusiastic about what they're proposing to waste the middle button on.
- merlincorey 13y ago
  I don't use Gnome so it doesn't matter to me but... > Having two completely separate mechanisms for copy-paste (not talking about the UI, but the underlying clipboard/selection) genuinely is confusing. It's never consistent across applications. Will I be able to middle-click paste from this web browser to that terminal, or from this emacs to that Skype window? Or do I need to select + Ctrl-Insert in this terminal to copy to that other window. In my experience, middle click is an X thing and is the only thing generally guaranteed to work practically everywhere. For this reason, it seems not justifiable to me.
  - eqyiel 13y ago
    Not disagreeing with you, just wanted to say in case you didn't know: shift-insert has the same effect and doesn't require reaching for the mouse.
username42 13y ago
I do not understand how they go from https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/Selections https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/Selections where all the example are touchpad oriented (no middle button, just touch and long press) to the conclusion that the usual behaviour of middle button should be killed ?
baq 13y ago
As somebody who for all of his life used C-c and C-v for copy/paste, I wouldn't miss it at all. highlight to copy messes my workflow up.
jangeboers 13y ago
Gnome does its best to make itself irrelevant. New users aren't coming in, and the faithful unix geeks all passed on to better things. Openbox ftw!
borplk 13y ago
For the last couple of years, every time I hear about a change in GNOME, it almost reads as if the developers are screaming "F*CK YOU EVERYONE LEAVE US ALL ALONE WE HATE YOU".
barrkel 13y ago
Selection copy and middle-click paste is both good and bad. As a highlight-reader, I don't like automatic copy on selection. It's too easy to clobber the selection clipboard. It also affect usability on basic things like copying something from the terminal to paste into a browser's search box. Naturally, you want to delete the existing contents of the search box, but selecting it all to delete it clobbers the very thing you want to paste. The setup I have on Windows with Cygwin and mintty is my preference. There is only one clipboard, and normal GUI selections don't have any affect on it. However, selection in the terminal copies into the clipboard, and middle-click in the terminal pastes the clipboard. Combine that with keyboard shortcuts for pasting the clipboard in the terminal, and a couple of command-line scripts (I call mine 'c' and 'p') for using copy and paste with pipes, and everything works pretty smoothly. As it is on Linux, my 'c' reads stdin and stuffs it into both primary and clipboard buffers, while my 'p' takes an argument 's' to print out the primary buffer, otherwise it prints out the clipboard buffer. It's a pain when you end up pasting the wrong thing. Meanwhile, middle-click in UI apps is very rarely used because (a) it requires too much precision in aim - the text usually ends up exactly where you middle-click, rather than the current position of the cursor - and (b), I usually want paste to replace a selection, but the act of selection clobbers what I'm trying to paste...
trippy_biscuits 13y ago
Gnome (Bastien), please accept my middle click. How long will it be before someone forks gnome just to get X paste behavior back? I hope they call it Troll.
corobo 13y ago
I hope it's optional at worst.. This is one of the features I am struggling really hard to get working on my Windows box :(
inthewind 13y ago
I like the middle mouse paste, or rather the highlight to copy more. But it can catch me out. What I find catches me out more though, is the tap to click on a touch pad. I do like it, but I often get tripped up by it. I therefore declare It's flawed - rip it out ;) Good to question these things. I do think the chorded keyboard shortcuts that may be ingrained in many, are actually a difficult combo for the novice. I'd suggest that a mouse selection is easier, but alas that's a really difficult thing to do for mouse newbs too. I can still struggle with mouse text selection.

47 points by alrs 13y ago

angersock 13y ago

Really? What a bunch of jerks--hasn't this been standard behavior for quite some time?

angersock 13y ago
More details here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665193 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665193 Sometwhat telling: (In reply to comment #2) > Breaking a default that has been in X forever is not desirable. In this case, > it is a good default. Leave it alone. Bastien, please do not do this. Disabling broken behaviour by default is a good thing. It would be a GTK+ specific XSetting, which would only be disabled by default based on your XSettings manager. If you use gnome-settings-daemon, then it would be disabled by default. The people that paste their passwords to IRC will thank us. Literally everyone in the bug thread is like "Please, don't do this/why would you do this?" and Bastien is like "nope nope better for the users hush". What a bunch of tools.
- dalai 13y ago
  A reply by a Gnome dev to an older bug (536271) about this is even more telling: I would even go as far as to disable middle mouse paste without exposing any GUI option for this [...] A hardcore unix person will shout and scream if we try to remove it, yet it is flawed. We should remove it and use a one, predictable way of copy & pasting.
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    c.f Jef Raskin's idea of the 'monotonous' interface, i.e. an interface in which common actions could be performed in one way only, and that one way could be predicted from context reliably. He thought that the result would be an interface that is easy to learn quickly. And that raises the old issue of 'experts' with the interface wanting more control. I actually like Gnome Shell, but I can see how a decision making process that depends on what one developer thinks is good for users may have problems in the longer term...
    - rrmm 13y ago
      The devs seem like they're on some sort of holy war to purify the gui. The problem is that interface design (like anything else) is about trade-offs. GNOME needs some folks that have been through this cycle and understand it.

raphinou 13y ago

The middle click to paste is one of the great features I use continuously, and often show to windows users who find it useful too.

dlsym 13y ago

Sometimes I get the feeling that there are only idiots or assholes working on gnome :-/ It all started with this whole: "Yeah - let's dumb it all down."-movement. "Improvements" like these are just disgusting. (Edit: This falls into the same category of great ideas like the "spatial nautilus".)

brokenparser 13y ago
I liked spatial nautilus, it endorsed KISS. Other operating systems that had the same basic interface include classic Mac OS and Windows 95. Both of them were easy to use as well (until they crashed) though the latter messed up by having a virtual desktop folder become the root of a tree with more virtual folders that didn't have anything to do with filesystems (they kept going downhill ever since).

kbuck 13y ago

This change was backed out: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-settings-daemon/commit/plugins/xsettings/gsd-xsettings-manager.c?id=e204eddcdbfb9f8d722355fab1643330c7d10c25 https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-settings-daemon/commit/pl...

dlsym 13y ago
Great. They "defered this change until the next cycle."
angersock 13y ago
Yay! Now I'm just looking forward to the update where this is quietly reinserted and things start acting weird.
parley 13y ago
However, the comment for re-enabling middle click paste seems to indicate that it will indeed be removed in the future: "We're not really ready for this change, and we haven't messaged it properly. After discussion with Allan Day and Jakup Steiner, we'll defer this change until the next cycle."
- keithpeter 13y ago
  A free/open source project that worries about 'messaging'? Has something gone wrong? As others have commented, I've always found that having two copy paste processes cause a slight mental pause sometimes. I tend to use middle drag middle click paste in terminal applications and the drag to highlight, select edit/copy then click in desired position, select edit/paste for graphical applications. Interesting to see how this pans out. Gnome has significant contributions from Red Hat staff. Red Hat have suggested they will be releasing the desktop RHEL7 with Gnome Classic as the default UI to minimise training costs for customers.[1] [1] http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Red-Hat-confirms-GNOME-Classic-Mode-for-RHEL-7-1887469.html http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Red-Hat-confirms-GNOM...

kragniz 13y ago

Although this particular feature isn't going to affect me, since I'm primarily a touchpad user, I'm not a fan of the path they're going with imitating iOS-style selection handles. Sure, they can be useful if you only have a touchscreen, but seem to always look ugly and feel awkward to use.

doe88 13y ago

I would say this is the one feature I miss the most on OS X, copy just by selecting text and paste with middle click.

RBerenguel 13y ago
I think you can add this with BetterTouchTool. At least I managed to add an almost plumbing rule with middle clicking on my old MB, I have to try it on the new, though

AlexanderDhoore 13y ago

Here's a pretty truthful evaluation of the direction Gnome is going, by the smart, geeky folks from the Linux Action Show: (Just watch 20 seconds... you'll get it) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Z8Kz27PC3_E#t=1593 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Z8K...

brokenparser 13y ago
Skip to 26:11

Afal 13y ago

GNOME 4 will be just one button that makes fart noises when you press it

vacri 13y ago
In 4.1 they'll remove the fart noise, because 'not everyone will have sound hooked up, and we want to provide a consistent experience'...
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Silent ... but deadly. Yeah, that's GNOME in a nutshell.
- brokenparser 13y ago
  In 4.2 they'll have the button press itself after a time-out unless you cancel it, because the user might forget to press it.
sameerds 13y ago
I have a great suggestion for the GNOME desktop: Disable leftward movement of the mouse. Moving left is for losers. Real users only move right, and keep going right until the mouse pointer warps around to the left edge of the screen. Then we can use the "move left" gesture to open up a "motion context menu", where it can show options such as "Move to workspace", or "Move to KDE" and so on.

VMG 13y ago

I'm curious to see how this plays out. The X default with two clipboards is insane, but I think the best option is to merge those into one and keep the middle click. The design docs: https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/Selections https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/Selections

silon3 13y ago
Agreed. I could live with this change, too. To bad gnome shell ruined gnome usability in other ways, so it's no longer relevant.
- username42 13y ago
  I am curious of your grief against gnome shell. Since Ubuntu has switched to unity, I have lost a lot of time to find an alternative. I am satisfied with Ubuntu-Gnome that I have installed on the computer of my father. I intend to switch all my computers to Ubuntu-Gnome. Maybe you have found issues that could annoys me also.
cs02rm0 13y ago
If you merge them won't you either lose the highlight-copy or have the highlight-copy throw out your explicitly copied text? I like having the two separate, that would be a retrograde step as far as I'm concerned.
vacri 13y ago
When I moved from Windows to Linux, the addition of the 'selection' clipboard was the easiest change, and quickest to pick up. It's really not hard. You have the same ctrl-c-v clipboard as always. In addition to that, there is another clipboard for the last selected item, deliverable with a middle click. It's a good feature, not a wart.

bifrost 13y ago

Guess I'm glad I don't use this stuff. WTH. My productivity would slow to a crawl if I couldn't middlebutton paste. Maybe they could work on something useful, like fixing memory leaks or making it not hugely bloated?

jsnell 13y ago

I dislike the UX changes done in Gnome 3 as much as anyone, and middle-click paste is firmly wedged in my muscle memory. But this is actually a change that's justifiable, unlike the general change for change's sake. Having two completely separate mechanisms for copy-paste (not talking about the UI, but the underlying clipboard/selection) genuinely is confusing. It's never consistent across applications. Will I be able to middle-click paste from this web browser to that terminal, or from this emacs to that Skype window? Or do I need to select + Ctrl-Insert in this terminal to copy to that other window. Pretty much no way to know without learning it by trial and error. After almost two decades of using X I'm still surprised weekly about pasting the wrong thing due to this stuff. (And any time I paste text to an IRC terminal, I make sure to paste it to a throwaway window first to verify I've really got the right content). And really, while I will continuously use select + middle-click to copy, it's only because of muscle memory. It's not some huge productivity boost over using the keyboard shortcuts. And once it stops working, the muscle memory can easily be retrained. (Remember how you probably complained when browsers stopped treating middle-click with an url in the selection as "open url"? I have no trouble admitting that I whined like hell about the massive loss in productivity it'd cause me. A month later I didn't particularly miss it, because I was automatically using a different workflow.) The primary selection is a ridiculous vestige. Good riddance. I'm less enthusiastic about what they're proposing to waste the middle button on.

merlincorey 13y ago
I don't use Gnome so it doesn't matter to me but... > Having two completely separate mechanisms for copy-paste (not talking about the UI, but the underlying clipboard/selection) genuinely is confusing. It's never consistent across applications. Will I be able to middle-click paste from this web browser to that terminal, or from this emacs to that Skype window? Or do I need to select + Ctrl-Insert in this terminal to copy to that other window. In my experience, middle click is an X thing and is the only thing generally guaranteed to work practically everywhere. For this reason, it seems not justifiable to me.
- eqyiel 13y ago
  Not disagreeing with you, just wanted to say in case you didn't know: shift-insert has the same effect and doesn't require reaching for the mouse.

username42 13y ago

I do not understand how they go from https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/Selections https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/Selections where all the example are touchpad oriented (no middle button, just touch and long press) to the conclusion that the usual behaviour of middle button should be killed ?

baq 13y ago

As somebody who for all of his life used C-c and C-v for copy/paste, I wouldn't miss it at all. highlight to copy messes my workflow up.

jangeboers 13y ago

Gnome does its best to make itself irrelevant. New users aren't coming in, and the faithful unix geeks all passed on to better things. Openbox ftw!

borplk 13y ago

For the last couple of years, every time I hear about a change in GNOME, it almost reads as if the developers are screaming "F*CK YOU EVERYONE LEAVE US ALL ALONE WE HATE YOU".

barrkel 13y ago

Selection copy and middle-click paste is both good and bad. As a highlight-reader, I don't like automatic copy on selection. It's too easy to clobber the selection clipboard. It also affect usability on basic things like copying something from the terminal to paste into a browser's search box. Naturally, you want to delete the existing contents of the search box, but selecting it all to delete it clobbers the very thing you want to paste. The setup I have on Windows with Cygwin and mintty is my preference. There is only one clipboard, and normal GUI selections don't have any affect on it. However, selection in the terminal copies into the clipboard, and middle-click in the terminal pastes the clipboard. Combine that with keyboard shortcuts for pasting the clipboard in the terminal, and a couple of command-line scripts (I call mine 'c' and 'p') for using copy and paste with pipes, and everything works pretty smoothly. As it is on Linux, my 'c' reads stdin and stuffs it into both primary and clipboard buffers, while my 'p' takes an argument 's' to print out the primary buffer, otherwise it prints out the clipboard buffer. It's a pain when you end up pasting the wrong thing. Meanwhile, middle-click in UI apps is very rarely used because (a) it requires too much precision in aim - the text usually ends up exactly where you middle-click, rather than the current position of the cursor - and (b), I usually want paste to replace a selection, but the act of selection clobbers what I'm trying to paste...

trippy_biscuits 13y ago

Gnome (Bastien), please accept my middle click. How long will it be before someone forks gnome just to get X paste behavior back? I hope they call it Troll.

corobo 13y ago

I hope it's optional at worst.. This is one of the features I am struggling really hard to get working on my Windows box :(

inthewind 13y ago

I like the middle mouse paste, or rather the highlight to copy more. But it can catch me out. What I find catches me out more though, is the tap to click on a touch pad. I do like it, but I often get tripped up by it. I therefore declare It's flawed - rip it out ;) Good to question these things. I do think the chorded keyboard shortcuts that may be ingrained in many, are actually a difficult combo for the novice. I'd suggest that a mouse selection is easier, but alas that's a really difficult thing to do for mouse newbs too. I can still struggle with mouse text selection.