7 ms·

GNOME Developers Hate the Mouse, Remove Middle-Click Paste

65 points by jbk 13y ago

iv_08 13y ago
If they "hate the mouse" why do they actually add more functionality to the middle mouse button? The article headline makes no sense.
travelorg 13y ago
No!
hbbio 13y ago
Oh, no! This is one of the most useful Linux/X features. People want the feature on OSX, even with quirks. http://superuser.com/questions/87470/copy-on-select-paste-on-middle-click-on-mac-os-x http://superuser.com/questions/87470/copy-on-select-paste-on...
- rsynnott 13y ago
  Yeah; this is about the only thing I think X11 does better than MacOS.
  - davidw 13y ago
    MacOS apparently does not do focus follows mouse. The thought makes me shudder!
    - hbbio 13y ago
      That, is a different story. As I have the habit of moving out the cursor to an edge to keep the window clear when I type, I never use this in any WM settings.
      - AjithAntony 13y ago
        There is likely a "hide mouse pointer while typing" setting somewhere
    - eddieroger 13y ago
      By focus, do you mean automatically making the window containing the mouse the active one? It will send scroll events to whatever window the mouse is over, which I find really nice when I have two open, typing in one but reading from something else (like a PDF or web page). It saves me two clicks to not change focus just to scroll, but not let the other window take over. I guess it's all just a preference then.
      - zenojevski 13y ago
        I'll add that OSX has a wonderful focus behavior. As you said, scrolling under pointer is a huge boon, but also clicking on background windows (in most well-behaved apps) usually focuses the window without sending the click to the window (possibly triggering an unintended destructive action). But the best part is that cmd-click allows interacting with windows without focusing them, allowing all sorts of things like translating your IM window out from under a movie player without covering the video.
        eddieroger 13y ago
        jaw drops I didn't know cmd+click. I can't think of a good use case in my world, but I'm pleased as punch that it exists, and that I've learned something new about OSX today.
    - zenojevski 13y ago
      Can you elaborate on this? When I tried it, this feature made me feel very unsafe, in that a small, "unrelated" movement of the mouse could lead to huge modifications to my current desktop workspace (and snap me out of concentration at the very least). Seems a feature that leads to surprise, a bit like if "i" worked as a toggle both in command mode and insert mode in vim. I'll note that I'm not bashing the feature, nor a personal preference. I'd like to know what advantages are there, from a knowledgeable user.
      - davidw 13y ago
        > When I tried it, this feature made me feel very unsafe I use it to switch between windows without having to fiddle with something like alt-shift, or clicking on the target window each time I want to move. It's about speed, not safety. Once you get used to it though, I don't think you end up in the wrong window very often.
- deong 13y ago
  I use PopClip (http://pilotmoon.com/popclip/ http://pilotmoon.com/popclip/) on my Macs. It's not quite as seamless as having everything you select automatically available for middle-click pasting, but it's pretty close.
perlgeek 13y ago
Please don't. It's ennoying enough in the "normal" case when pasting doesn't work with the middle-click, but in the past I've had several cases with X-forwarded windows where Ctrl+Insert used the paste buffer of the remote machine, and middle click used the paste buffer of the local machine. Removing the middle-click paste means I have no convenient way to copy&paste into "remote" applications anymore.
quchen 13y ago
Before this thread starts to become a rant about Gnome developers again, I'd like to mention that I find middle-mouse pasting annoying and I would appreciate an option to disable it in X. What the Gnome devs did was just inverting the setting without providing an option for it, which is a pretty awful idea.
- probably_wrong 13y ago
  I'm interested in why you'd like to see an option to disable it, considering that you could just as well not click the button. Is there something in your daily workflow that leads to lots of accidental presses?
  - latk 13y ago
    For me: a touchpad as the primary pointer input device. I use two fingers for scrolling and a two-finger tap as middle mouse button clicks. I really like that setup for web browsing, but it frequently messes up code in the editor.
    - claudius 13y ago
      I guess it depends on the hardware used – I mostly use one of these external Thinkpad-like keyboards with three dedicated buttons and a track point and never accidentally middle-paste. But I guess if middle-click never does anything useful for you (Windows, Mac), you might prioritise it less in your hardware design :|
      - ANTSANTS 13y ago
        It does do useful things on Windows. There are the browser behaviors I mentioned above. Most image editors use middle click to pan, and I think 3D modeling programs use it to rotate and pan as well. It's only in dedicated text boxes that middle click does nothing useful, but we're all so used to Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V that we don't have any desire to use that button for pasting.
mgkimsal 13y ago
Have there been many examples of GNOME devs removing or substantially changing a feature, then reversing the decision based on community outcry? This seemed to be a trend 10 years ago or so - I haven't used GNOME on a daily basis since then - and it seemed the GNOME team has almost always had a "this is how it will be, no arguments" attitude. It's probably a perception more than anything else, but perception is reality, don't they say? Trying to make radical changes then hiding behind "Human Interface Guidelines" - even when the new behaviour is demonstrably bad - seemed to be their MO all those years ago, but my memory may be a bit hazy now. So... we'll have a thread here of people saying "no, don't do it!" or "give me an option to toggle!" but I suspect the damage is done and this is how it will be. What decisions have been overturned by community feedback?
- bjourne 13y ago
  Yes, sort of. Epiphany developers for a long time resisted adding tabs to the browser and instead insisted that handling multiple viewports was the job of the window manager. In theory, they were right, in practice it just doesn't work. Then somewhere around GNOME 2.12 or so, Nautilus fell in love with the "spatial" concept. So each directory opened would open its own window and also remember the window position so it would be opened in the exact same location the next time. Leads to the user having 30+ windows open if you want to drill down to some files a few directories deep. No way to undo the suckyness except to edit some gconf registry key. The User Interface Designers thought it was great. Everyone else thought it was a disaster. Fortunately it was changed to something more sensible a few releases after and the spatial desktop horse is (for now) dead and buried. Btw, while I sound really critical of GNOME, I'm not. I think it's great that they try new and wacky ideas that no one likes. Sometimes they strike gold and then progress is made benefitting all of us.
  - mgkimsal 13y ago
    IMO, it's the perception of attitude when introducing new and wacky ideas. People seeing these new ideas say "that's wacky/bad/misguided/wrong/etc" and the defense (used to, anyway) fell back to "our HIG says this is the best way" (paraphrasing). To then recant years later and reverse things just makes it harder to accept any new ideas that come out as received wisdom. If they had a 'wacky new ideas' branch for people to test on, I suspect the whole thing would be received a lot better.
andreer 13y ago
I'll miss this feature, but I realize that for the "average user" which only uses ctrl-x/c/v it is probably a good thing. Personally, I've long been planning to switch back to a tiling wm anyway.
- antocv 13y ago
  Who is this average user you are talking about? Its a myth, a fantasy, an excuse for all things gnome and other "lets make a product for idiots" does to butcher itself into oblivion, many startups do the same mistake. The idea "for the average user" or "for your grandmother" is a mind-trap that leads to poor choices and poor products. Dont make products for someone not interested in using it, make them for someone like a child instead of an old person like a grandmother. Just give a kid a smartphone or KDE and look how they learn and use the devices (Ive seen it with my own eyes, a kid use KDE to start his games, save pictures form the internet, view them in dolphin etc, and he was just 4-5 years at the time.), and give a smartphone or KDE to a grandmother and see basically nothing happen.
- inthewind 13y ago
  You really think that average users use the keyboard shortcuts? I'd wager they use the menus or icons. Chorded keyboard shortcuts are not that easy, especially for novices. I wonder how you copy and paste with a touch device? And how easy it is.
samuellevy 13y ago
Every time I end up using windows, I end up frustratedly middle-clicking, expecting text to come out. I have been using MATE to remain productive (gnome 3 and Unity really don't fit my workflow), so this won't really affect me, but it puts another nail in the coffin of the idea that I might transition to gnome 3 in the future.
workbench 13y ago
This feature always seemed weird anyway. Misclicks could be very destructive
JulianMorrison 13y ago
Lets all just agree to ignore Gnome. They can go sit in their cell, and draw unusable user interfaces on the walls in wax crayon, and mumble about how, with all the features removed except one big bright button that you can't click because it recognises neither mouse nor keyboard, Gnome is finally complete.
- VMG 13y ago
  Why are non-gnome users always so pissed about Gnome when there apparently are so many excellent alternatives?
  - JulianMorrison 13y ago
    Because we used to like it.
  - PommeDeTerre 13y ago
    We may not use GNOME today, but many of us did happily use it before the GNOME 3 disaster. After that happened, though, we had no choice but to move to other environments. Some of us even hoped that maybe someday the situation would reverse itself, and GNOME could once again become a viable desktop environment. Unfortunately, it has become clear over time that this is not the case, and likely never will be. It's disappointing to see a project that was once quite useful, yet still with a lot of potential, be destroyed so quickly and unnecessarily. And it's perfectly acceptable and understandable for us to voice our displeasure with further degradation of what GNOME once stood for.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Because I, for one, could give two shits about the GNOME desktop environment as a whole, but find that there are occasionally useful applications written for it. Most recently, GNOME Terminal, ironically enough (it's about as non-GUI as you can get for an application, but it's a reasonably nice terminal emulator, and does a few things my trusty old rxvt doesn't: dynamic rescaling, dynamic color themes). Rhythmbox comes to mind. A few others. I really don't care where the hell my apps come from, in terms of toolkit. But if they break very-well-established Linux / Unix behaviors, it really pisses me off. I've also seen GNOME disease utterly fuck up perfectly good applications (the Galeon Web browser comes to mind). Worse, occasionally unaffiliated developers look at what GNOME is doing after a few too many hits on the crack pipe themselves and think it's a good idea. GNOME's utter user hostility and imperviousness to any level of logic or reason had already gotten old a decade ago.
_pmf_ 13y ago
I hope this is from an Onion article, otherwise I fear for the safety of GNOME developers world wide.
lutoma 13y ago
Well there go the last Gnome users… Since Ubuntu abandoned it, Gnome seems to be getting less and less usage (I can't blame anyone for it, seeing as how it's become completely unusable…).
the_mitsuhiko 13y ago
I'm more than okay with that. Middle click paste is one of the weirdest user experience elements and it does not even safe much time and is very easy to miss execute.
- oakwhiz 13y ago
  It's really useful when you have to paste many things repeatedly in a way that has some spatial ordering. But most of the time I dislike middle-click paste (and highlight-to-copy) because I will occasionally copy and paste things accidentally. Some kind of keyboard shortcut to toggle this behavior might be quite handy.
  - m_mueller 13y ago
    I recommend using something like Sublimes Multicursor instead. 1) Ctrl-alt-L: Give me a cursor at the end of all selected lines. 2) Select the line paces you want to paste using normal editor keyboard commands. 3) Ctrl-C 4) Go to the place in your lines where you want to paste (or click somewhere to get a new cursor and paste everything newline separated) 5) Ctrl-V Scales to however many lines you want to do this to, with 'constant programmer time' ;-).
- NoodleIncident 13y ago
  Its a beautiful command when all you have is a touchpad. Click both right and left to paste the last selected text.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Which is why I prefer Lenovo touchpads: three buttons. Actually, mine has five: Three at the top (corresponding to the mouse buttons), generally used with the trackpoint. Another two at the bottom (two-button mouse), used with the trackpad (which I've, of course, disabled in BIOS like any sane user would).
- VMG 13y ago
  Don't forget that it is one of two buffers, called PRIMARY for whatever reason (there is no secondary). If you select and press Ctrl-C, the content goes to CLIPBOARD. I can't count the number of times I've yelled expletives when I pasted the wrong buffer by mistake. There should only be one clipboard.
fhd2 13y ago
Looking at the commit in question, they're not only removing it, they're planning to have a new function for middle clicking: > The middle-click will be used to start selections, and provide text contextual menus (such as word definitions, sharing, etc.) This seems wrong. They're removing a slightly obscure feature to replace it with a completely obscure one. I wouldn't call myself an UX expert, but this seems to violate at least two important principles: 1. Affordance/User expectations: How is anybody going to figure this out, if not by accident? Worse, users who knew the middle click will probably be irritated by this. 2. Consistency: Are only Gnome applications going to support this? It very much seems like that. So their new function for middle clicking won't even work consistently across applications. I know I'm being an armchair critic here, but I honestly wonder why they think it's a good idea.
- brokenparser 13y ago
  2 doesn't really matter because other desktops might not want this at all. If they do, someone should make an effort to create a freedesktop.org standard codifying the (shared) behaviour in an agnostic manner. Can happen, but if you want to run a KDE program in Gnome you're bound to see inconsistencies all over the place. Both of them think their way is best.
- matt__rose 13y ago
  There's nothing obscure about middle-click paste. It's been a standard on every UNIX workstation going back to SunOS and IRIX
derefr 13y ago
> According to a commit on this matter, it will [instead] be used to "start selections ... You mean, like Plan9's UI, where buttons and menus are "just" text? That'd be something I'd love to see come to another desktop environment...
yalogin 13y ago
There are many over reactions in this thread and none of them mentioned they actually use the paste feature. What is the big deal? I like it. I don't know any one that uses the middle button for pasting. In fact the middle is more likely to be a scroll wheel and so clicking on that never happens. Overloading that something is okay with me.
- patmcguire 13y ago
  Using the middle button for pasting what's highlighted is one of the few things on X11 that's consistent across configurations and over the past 25-ish years.
- dbaupp 13y ago
  I use it all the time, even with a scroll-wheel; far more than I use ctrl-C/V.
  - buster 13y ago
    Everyone suggesting to use ctrl-c/v is not often using a terminal i guess ;) So now in the future i have to select test in a terminal with the mouse, right click, click copy and then hit ctrl-v or right click again, whereas now i just select text and hit the middle mouse?! Please, leave the middle-mouse-paste an option or atleast make it a gnome-extension :(
    - jkbyc 13y ago
      you can use Ctrl+C outside the terminal and then Ctrl+Shift+V to paste into it (similarly Ctrl+Shift+C for copying from terminal) btw, I also use clicking the scroll-wheel to paste all the time
      - buster 13y ago
        I didn't even know ctrl+shift works BUT also i like to keep my fingers in tact ( = pressing ctrl+shift+c feels like a complicated yoga-practice)
mseepgood 13y ago
What a stupid article.
davidw 13y ago
I've been using this feature for, let's see... about 16 years, and it's not just an ingrained habit, it's actually quite useful. Sooner or later it looks like I'm going to have to sit down and fiddle with the alternatives to Gnome. It's kind of puerile, but for whatever reason this gave me a good laugh: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6282043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6282043
- adestefan 13y ago
  I thought same until I used other systems (mainly OS X and some Windows 7) for around 2 years. I've been using Linux full time again about the past 2 months and now realize it's more of a pain in the ass than it's usually worth.
- mattdeboard 13y ago
  I switched to xmonad and have been kicking myself for waiting so long to switch.
erikb 13y ago
Well, although I also think that established default behaviour should only be changed with great care and the option to turn it back easily, I wouldn't form an opinion about such a huge change just based on one article. It doesn't give much context. Reading in the Issue and the commit it's also possible that the Gnome community is against this change as well and it was a decision by a Bastien Nocera withouth the community's consent. This might mean it gets reverted before the user sees it or shortly after. So there is not much to get upset about right now.
thomasahle 13y ago
I've hated this feature for 10 years. Clicking ny scrollwheel us supposed to do something scroll related, like it does in certain programs, but this stupid paste thing makes inconsistent. Sometimes I've even seen the middle button paste into the address bar and send me off, loosing whatever unsaved work I had on a website. If I want to paste I'll use the keyboard, Ctrl+Shift+V is perfectly fine. Why don't all you non gnome using gnome haters go somewhere else to complain?
- chris_wot 13y ago
  Why would your scroll wheel be a button? Sounds like hardware UX fail.
- draven 13y ago
  The wheel came after the button (ie there were 3 button mouses first and the middle button morphed into a button/scroll wheel hybrid later, there was nothing strictly scrolling related to the middle button before.)
Fice 13y ago
They are not simply removing middle-click paste function, but replacing it with something presumably more useful. What I learned from my own experience with GNOME 3 (I really like it) and from observing other people's reactions, is that we tend to overestimate the importance of our old habits and are willing to put more effort to protect them than it would take to change them (e.g. spending all day figuring out how to customize the UI while it would take an hour to get used to the defaults).
- claudius 13y ago
  It takes about 30 minutes top to install Xfce…
  - Fice 13y ago
    And then spend the rest of the day configuring it to match the habits acquired with whatever desktop environment that was used before installing Xfce.
beijingcocktail 13y ago
Mddle click paste is one of the things that made me install Linux on my MacBook whrn I geniunlybtried to switch to OS X. For me at least, this feature significantly improves the UX. I use many times every day.
3amOpsGuy 13y ago
Middle paste has never been a reliable feature, (are you pasting from X clipboard or GNOME clipboard? - it changes depending on context). For that reason alone, i can see a case can be made for this change. At first glance it seems like a backward move to me, but i'd be at least willing to give the idea a try. GNOME 3 takes a lot of heat, they're one of the few actually pushing the envelope so it's to be expected i suppose. A little more encouragement and a little less boring complaints "stating the obvious" would go a long way.
pdkl95 13y ago
I have tried many times over the last decade or so to retire my current window manager of choice (Enlightenment DR16). The software hasn't been maintained significantly for most of that time, and several incompatibilities and problematic behavior with modern[1] software. I initially assumed this was only familiarity with my current environment and dependence on the various settings, tweaks, and shortcuts that build up over the years. Jumping into any other WM was obviously going to take some time to get used to, and finding out how to re-enable stuff like my preferred keys for switching virtual-desktop should only take a weekend to figure out and port over. All of the replacements ended up being reverted back to my working E16, usually because of either: creeping featurism/bloat slowing down or interfering with overall responsiveness, or this recent distressing trend to remove well-established features and behaviors. What's particularly distressing is that these problems seem to be getting worse with time. I gave up attempting to find a sane configuration for GNOME years ago due to their overall bloat and confusing and rarely-consistent style. Misfeatures like this mouse button change suggests they are now embracing the Microsoft-style "Principle of Maximal Surprise" style of software design. If you told me a decade ago that I'd be using the WM traditionally described as "unnecessary eye-candy" because it is faster than the other options, I wouldn't have believed you. If crap like changing the mouse buttons becomes wide-spread, though, I guess I'll be stuck using E16 for _another_ decade. At least I have a (mostly) working WM to fallback on, I suppose. The feature-removal drama in Firefox is quickly becoming far more problematic... [1]: "modern" being defined as "some time after Rasterman started teasing us with very-early E17 prototypes"
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  You've just described my situation, though my window manager is WindowMaker, not E. The lack of development is a feature. It works, its fast and stable, and there are very, very few surprises. I've tweaked it modestly with some appearance, behavior, and keybinding settings, otherwise its a very low-fuss configuration. And I've been using it for 16 years. That's a lot of familiarity.
- sergiosgc 13y ago
  Congratulations on managing to still have E16 running. I used it, then windowmaker, then gnome. When I tried to go back from gnome to E, all sorts of little things broke. I finally settled on i3. It is first strange, then estranged, then really great (it disappears, as any good desktop environment should).
chris_wot 13y ago
Imagine, if you will, that Gnome developers had control over keyboards. The first key to be removed would be sysreq, then scroll-lock, and break. And it was dubbed Keyboard 2.0 In Keyboard 2.1, the caps lock key was removed as you can use the shift key. The Windows key was surplus to requirements, there's a perfectly good alt key. Fast forward to Keyboard 3.0. There is no longer a control key (hold down alt for 2 seconds!), numlock is gone (the top row has numbers), cursor keys gone (you can use a mouse to move around). In Keyboard 3.1 they removed the shift key as stylistically capitals aren't necessary. in keyboard 3.2 they removed the comma and semicolon. these really aren't necessary as you don't need to pause when reading. in keyboard 3.3 there is no need for single quotes because you should not use contractions. that just causes confusion and besides the amount of debates and derision around it were getting ridiculous. justification: world peace and an end to grammar nazis. in keyboard 35 they are seriously considering removing the enter key the exclamation mark and any characters that require umlauts also they have removed the full stop because ideas dont exist in a vacuum so why should sentences as these are constructs of a narrow mind not to mention this will help with a cleaner text rendering codebase
- lcedp 13y ago
  It's funny that in your comment meaning to be as ridiculous as possible there are a few very sane ideas i.e. getting rid of caps lock and num lock keys which nobody uses and everybody is pissed of when they pressed accidentally.
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    I find it funny that you think that "nobody" uses the caps lock key!
- solnyshok 13y ago
  I USE CAPSLOCK ALL THE TIME!!! :)
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    I shall now write a blog post with dozens of links as to why my "no capitals" stance is the one and true way and you are wrong and unenlightened.
moron4hire 13y ago
I hated this feature of Gnome, but I will probably hate what they're replacing it with even more. I use the middle click to open links in new tabs and to close said tabs, and every other window manager I've used does it that way. What's next? Draw a small circle around the things you want to select with the cursor instead of left clicking on them?
inthewind 13y ago
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6281881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6281881
chris_wot 13y ago
From the bug report: (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. --- And there you have their use case. People who use IRC. Instead of giving an option of disabling middle clicking in the IRC application (or per-application) they will, instead, be removing this commonly used feature, because "won't someone think of the users?"
- rbanffy 13y ago
  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665193 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665193, in case anyone is wondering.
inthewind 13y ago
They'd probably be better off trying to jettison the keyboard to simplify the computer interface.
- VLM 13y ago
  ... and the mouse, and the display... just SSH in. This closely resembles the herd of servers at my disposal. I find it a highly productive desktop environment / user interface.
JeremyNT 13y ago
I find the GNOME project fascinating to watch. Many users, myself included, have railed at the removal of things we have grown accustomed to. Some time ago, however, I decided to just give up and go along for the ride. Why not? These people surely have more UX experience than I do. Perhaps I don't really know best in this regard, even though I know what has worked for me in the past. Perhaps there are better ways. In fact, I find GNOME 3 is actually quite usable if one can manage to remove one's expectations based on prior versions. After the initial pain of "giving up" features I had become used to over the years, I found myself enjoying its simplicity. GNOME is a singular case study in its dogged determination to rapidly cull beloved features; indeed, I can't think of any other UI project of this size that has been so aggressive and so blind to user input. There are few things the GNOME team seems to hold sacred, and likewise they seem more than willing to alienate existing users and violate user expectations in the name of progress. I find this kind of blind determination and adherence to design goals at the cost of popularity admirable in its own way, although it seems that the project is doomed to find only a small niche due to this approach (which, honestly, is kind of a shame, since I find it quite pleasant to work with). Like everybody else who has integrated middle click paste into their workflows, I'm going to feel the pain from the removal of this feature. But I'm pretty sure I'll still be able to get my work done without it, and eventually I'll forget about it completely, and I'll be OK with whatever replaces it.
aday 13y ago
This issue has got blown out of proportion, and the facts have been totally lost. Nothing has been changed. Those of us in the GNOME project were working towards a slightly different solution, which would allow middle-click paste like functionality. That solution didn't work out for the next release (3.10), so we reinstated the old behaviour. Everyone needs to calm down. We're not going to simply remove middle-click paste.

65 points by jbk 13y ago

iv_08 13y ago

If they "hate the mouse" why do they actually add more functionality to the middle mouse button? The article headline makes no sense.

travelorg 13y ago

No!

hbbio 13y ago

Oh, no! This is one of the most useful Linux/X features. People want the feature on OSX, even with quirks. http://superuser.com/questions/87470/copy-on-select-paste-on-middle-click-on-mac-os-x http://superuser.com/questions/87470/copy-on-select-paste-on...

rsynnott 13y ago
Yeah; this is about the only thing I think X11 does better than MacOS.
- davidw 13y ago
  MacOS apparently does not do focus follows mouse. The thought makes me shudder!
  - hbbio 13y ago
    That, is a different story. As I have the habit of moving out the cursor to an edge to keep the window clear when I type, I never use this in any WM settings.
    - AjithAntony 13y ago
      There is likely a "hide mouse pointer while typing" setting somewhere
  - eddieroger 13y ago
    By focus, do you mean automatically making the window containing the mouse the active one? It will send scroll events to whatever window the mouse is over, which I find really nice when I have two open, typing in one but reading from something else (like a PDF or web page). It saves me two clicks to not change focus just to scroll, but not let the other window take over. I guess it's all just a preference then.
    - zenojevski 13y ago
      I'll add that OSX has a wonderful focus behavior. As you said, scrolling under pointer is a huge boon, but also clicking on background windows (in most well-behaved apps) usually focuses the window without sending the click to the window (possibly triggering an unintended destructive action). But the best part is that cmd-click allows interacting with windows without focusing them, allowing all sorts of things like translating your IM window out from under a movie player without covering the video.
      - eddieroger 13y ago
        jaw drops I didn't know cmd+click. I can't think of a good use case in my world, but I'm pleased as punch that it exists, and that I've learned something new about OSX today.
  - zenojevski 13y ago
    Can you elaborate on this? When I tried it, this feature made me feel very unsafe, in that a small, "unrelated" movement of the mouse could lead to huge modifications to my current desktop workspace (and snap me out of concentration at the very least). Seems a feature that leads to surprise, a bit like if "i" worked as a toggle both in command mode and insert mode in vim. I'll note that I'm not bashing the feature, nor a personal preference. I'd like to know what advantages are there, from a knowledgeable user.
    - davidw 13y ago
      > When I tried it, this feature made me feel very unsafe I use it to switch between windows without having to fiddle with something like alt-shift, or clicking on the target window each time I want to move. It's about speed, not safety. Once you get used to it though, I don't think you end up in the wrong window very often.
deong 13y ago
I use PopClip (http://pilotmoon.com/popclip/ http://pilotmoon.com/popclip/) on my Macs. It's not quite as seamless as having everything you select automatically available for middle-click pasting, but it's pretty close.

perlgeek 13y ago

Please don't. It's ennoying enough in the "normal" case when pasting doesn't work with the middle-click, but in the past I've had several cases with X-forwarded windows where Ctrl+Insert used the paste buffer of the remote machine, and middle click used the paste buffer of the local machine. Removing the middle-click paste means I have no convenient way to copy&paste into "remote" applications anymore.

quchen 13y ago

Before this thread starts to become a rant about Gnome developers again, I'd like to mention that I find middle-mouse pasting annoying and I would appreciate an option to disable it in X. What the Gnome devs did was just inverting the setting without providing an option for it, which is a pretty awful idea.

probably_wrong 13y ago
I'm interested in why you'd like to see an option to disable it, considering that you could just as well not click the button. Is there something in your daily workflow that leads to lots of accidental presses?
- latk 13y ago
  For me: a touchpad as the primary pointer input device. I use two fingers for scrolling and a two-finger tap as middle mouse button clicks. I really like that setup for web browsing, but it frequently messes up code in the editor.
  - claudius 13y ago
    I guess it depends on the hardware used – I mostly use one of these external Thinkpad-like keyboards with three dedicated buttons and a track point and never accidentally middle-paste. But I guess if middle-click never does anything useful for you (Windows, Mac), you might prioritise it less in your hardware design :|
    - ANTSANTS 13y ago
      It does do useful things on Windows. There are the browser behaviors I mentioned above. Most image editors use middle click to pan, and I think 3D modeling programs use it to rotate and pan as well. It's only in dedicated text boxes that middle click does nothing useful, but we're all so used to Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V that we don't have any desire to use that button for pasting.

mgkimsal 13y ago

Have there been many examples of GNOME devs removing or substantially changing a feature, then reversing the decision based on community outcry? This seemed to be a trend 10 years ago or so - I haven't used GNOME on a daily basis since then - and it seemed the GNOME team has almost always had a "this is how it will be, no arguments" attitude. It's probably a perception more than anything else, but perception is reality, don't they say? Trying to make radical changes then hiding behind "Human Interface Guidelines" - even when the new behaviour is demonstrably bad - seemed to be their MO all those years ago, but my memory may be a bit hazy now. So... we'll have a thread here of people saying "no, don't do it!" or "give me an option to toggle!" but I suspect the damage is done and this is how it will be. What decisions have been overturned by community feedback?

bjourne 13y ago
Yes, sort of. Epiphany developers for a long time resisted adding tabs to the browser and instead insisted that handling multiple viewports was the job of the window manager. In theory, they were right, in practice it just doesn't work. Then somewhere around GNOME 2.12 or so, Nautilus fell in love with the "spatial" concept. So each directory opened would open its own window and also remember the window position so it would be opened in the exact same location the next time. Leads to the user having 30+ windows open if you want to drill down to some files a few directories deep. No way to undo the suckyness except to edit some gconf registry key. The User Interface Designers thought it was great. Everyone else thought it was a disaster. Fortunately it was changed to something more sensible a few releases after and the spatial desktop horse is (for now) dead and buried. Btw, while I sound really critical of GNOME, I'm not. I think it's great that they try new and wacky ideas that no one likes. Sometimes they strike gold and then progress is made benefitting all of us.
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  IMO, it's the perception of attitude when introducing new and wacky ideas. People seeing these new ideas say "that's wacky/bad/misguided/wrong/etc" and the defense (used to, anyway) fell back to "our HIG says this is the best way" (paraphrasing). To then recant years later and reverse things just makes it harder to accept any new ideas that come out as received wisdom. If they had a 'wacky new ideas' branch for people to test on, I suspect the whole thing would be received a lot better.

andreer 13y ago

I'll miss this feature, but I realize that for the "average user" which only uses ctrl-x/c/v it is probably a good thing. Personally, I've long been planning to switch back to a tiling wm anyway.

antocv 13y ago
Who is this average user you are talking about? Its a myth, a fantasy, an excuse for all things gnome and other "lets make a product for idiots" does to butcher itself into oblivion, many startups do the same mistake. The idea "for the average user" or "for your grandmother" is a mind-trap that leads to poor choices and poor products. Dont make products for someone not interested in using it, make them for someone like a child instead of an old person like a grandmother. Just give a kid a smartphone or KDE and look how they learn and use the devices (Ive seen it with my own eyes, a kid use KDE to start his games, save pictures form the internet, view them in dolphin etc, and he was just 4-5 years at the time.), and give a smartphone or KDE to a grandmother and see basically nothing happen.
inthewind 13y ago
You really think that average users use the keyboard shortcuts? I'd wager they use the menus or icons. Chorded keyboard shortcuts are not that easy, especially for novices. I wonder how you copy and paste with a touch device? And how easy it is.

samuellevy 13y ago

Every time I end up using windows, I end up frustratedly middle-clicking, expecting text to come out. I have been using MATE to remain productive (gnome 3 and Unity really don't fit my workflow), so this won't really affect me, but it puts another nail in the coffin of the idea that I might transition to gnome 3 in the future.

workbench 13y ago

This feature always seemed weird anyway. Misclicks could be very destructive

JulianMorrison 13y ago

Lets all just agree to ignore Gnome. They can go sit in their cell, and draw unusable user interfaces on the walls in wax crayon, and mumble about how, with all the features removed except one big bright button that you can't click because it recognises neither mouse nor keyboard, Gnome is finally complete.

VMG 13y ago
Why are non-gnome users always so pissed about Gnome when there apparently are so many excellent alternatives?
- JulianMorrison 13y ago
  Because we used to like it.
- PommeDeTerre 13y ago
  We may not use GNOME today, but many of us did happily use it before the GNOME 3 disaster. After that happened, though, we had no choice but to move to other environments. Some of us even hoped that maybe someday the situation would reverse itself, and GNOME could once again become a viable desktop environment. Unfortunately, it has become clear over time that this is not the case, and likely never will be. It's disappointing to see a project that was once quite useful, yet still with a lot of potential, be destroyed so quickly and unnecessarily. And it's perfectly acceptable and understandable for us to voice our displeasure with further degradation of what GNOME once stood for.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Because I, for one, could give two shits about the GNOME desktop environment as a whole, but find that there are occasionally useful applications written for it. Most recently, GNOME Terminal, ironically enough (it's about as non-GUI as you can get for an application, but it's a reasonably nice terminal emulator, and does a few things my trusty old rxvt doesn't: dynamic rescaling, dynamic color themes). Rhythmbox comes to mind. A few others. I really don't care where the hell my apps come from, in terms of toolkit. But if they break very-well-established Linux / Unix behaviors, it really pisses me off. I've also seen GNOME disease utterly fuck up perfectly good applications (the Galeon Web browser comes to mind). Worse, occasionally unaffiliated developers look at what GNOME is doing after a few too many hits on the crack pipe themselves and think it's a good idea. GNOME's utter user hostility and imperviousness to any level of logic or reason had already gotten old a decade ago.

_pmf_ 13y ago

I hope this is from an Onion article, otherwise I fear for the safety of GNOME developers world wide.

lutoma 13y ago

Well there go the last Gnome users… Since Ubuntu abandoned it, Gnome seems to be getting less and less usage (I can't blame anyone for it, seeing as how it's become completely unusable…).

the_mitsuhiko 13y ago

I'm more than okay with that. Middle click paste is one of the weirdest user experience elements and it does not even safe much time and is very easy to miss execute.

oakwhiz 13y ago
It's really useful when you have to paste many things repeatedly in a way that has some spatial ordering. But most of the time I dislike middle-click paste (and highlight-to-copy) because I will occasionally copy and paste things accidentally. Some kind of keyboard shortcut to toggle this behavior might be quite handy.
- m_mueller 13y ago
  I recommend using something like Sublimes Multicursor instead. 1) Ctrl-alt-L: Give me a cursor at the end of all selected lines. 2) Select the line paces you want to paste using normal editor keyboard commands. 3) Ctrl-C 4) Go to the place in your lines where you want to paste (or click somewhere to get a new cursor and paste everything newline separated) 5) Ctrl-V Scales to however many lines you want to do this to, with 'constant programmer time' ;-).
NoodleIncident 13y ago
Its a beautiful command when all you have is a touchpad. Click both right and left to paste the last selected text.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Which is why I prefer Lenovo touchpads: three buttons. Actually, mine has five: Three at the top (corresponding to the mouse buttons), generally used with the trackpoint. Another two at the bottom (two-button mouse), used with the trackpad (which I've, of course, disabled in BIOS like any sane user would).
VMG 13y ago
Don't forget that it is one of two buffers, called PRIMARY for whatever reason (there is no secondary). If you select and press Ctrl-C, the content goes to CLIPBOARD. I can't count the number of times I've yelled expletives when I pasted the wrong buffer by mistake. There should only be one clipboard.

fhd2 13y ago

Looking at the commit in question, they're not only removing it, they're planning to have a new function for middle clicking: > The middle-click will be used to start selections, and provide text contextual menus (such as word definitions, sharing, etc.) This seems wrong. They're removing a slightly obscure feature to replace it with a completely obscure one. I wouldn't call myself an UX expert, but this seems to violate at least two important principles: 1. Affordance/User expectations: How is anybody going to figure this out, if not by accident? Worse, users who knew the middle click will probably be irritated by this. 2. Consistency: Are only Gnome applications going to support this? It very much seems like that. So their new function for middle clicking won't even work consistently across applications. I know I'm being an armchair critic here, but I honestly wonder why they think it's a good idea.

brokenparser 13y ago
2 doesn't really matter because other desktops might not want this at all. If they do, someone should make an effort to create a freedesktop.org standard codifying the (shared) behaviour in an agnostic manner. Can happen, but if you want to run a KDE program in Gnome you're bound to see inconsistencies all over the place. Both of them think their way is best.
matt__rose 13y ago
There's nothing obscure about middle-click paste. It's been a standard on every UNIX workstation going back to SunOS and IRIX

derefr 13y ago

> According to a commit on this matter, it will [instead] be used to "start selections ... You mean, like Plan9's UI, where buttons and menus are "just" text? That'd be something I'd love to see come to another desktop environment...

yalogin 13y ago

There are many over reactions in this thread and none of them mentioned they actually use the paste feature. What is the big deal? I like it. I don't know any one that uses the middle button for pasting. In fact the middle is more likely to be a scroll wheel and so clicking on that never happens. Overloading that something is okay with me.

patmcguire 13y ago
Using the middle button for pasting what's highlighted is one of the few things on X11 that's consistent across configurations and over the past 25-ish years.
dbaupp 13y ago
I use it all the time, even with a scroll-wheel; far more than I use ctrl-C/V.
- buster 13y ago
  Everyone suggesting to use ctrl-c/v is not often using a terminal i guess ;) So now in the future i have to select test in a terminal with the mouse, right click, click copy and then hit ctrl-v or right click again, whereas now i just select text and hit the middle mouse?! Please, leave the middle-mouse-paste an option or atleast make it a gnome-extension :(
  - jkbyc 13y ago
    you can use Ctrl+C outside the terminal and then Ctrl+Shift+V to paste into it (similarly Ctrl+Shift+C for copying from terminal) btw, I also use clicking the scroll-wheel to paste all the time
    - buster 13y ago
      I didn't even know ctrl+shift works BUT also i like to keep my fingers in tact ( = pressing ctrl+shift+c feels like a complicated yoga-practice)

mseepgood 13y ago

What a stupid article.

davidw 13y ago

I've been using this feature for, let's see... about 16 years, and it's not just an ingrained habit, it's actually quite useful. Sooner or later it looks like I'm going to have to sit down and fiddle with the alternatives to Gnome. It's kind of puerile, but for whatever reason this gave me a good laugh: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6282043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6282043

adestefan 13y ago
I thought same until I used other systems (mainly OS X and some Windows 7) for around 2 years. I've been using Linux full time again about the past 2 months and now realize it's more of a pain in the ass than it's usually worth.
mattdeboard 13y ago
I switched to xmonad and have been kicking myself for waiting so long to switch.

erikb 13y ago

Well, although I also think that established default behaviour should only be changed with great care and the option to turn it back easily, I wouldn't form an opinion about such a huge change just based on one article. It doesn't give much context. Reading in the Issue and the commit it's also possible that the Gnome community is against this change as well and it was a decision by a Bastien Nocera withouth the community's consent. This might mean it gets reverted before the user sees it or shortly after. So there is not much to get upset about right now.

thomasahle 13y ago

I've hated this feature for 10 years. Clicking ny scrollwheel us supposed to do something scroll related, like it does in certain programs, but this stupid paste thing makes inconsistent. Sometimes I've even seen the middle button paste into the address bar and send me off, loosing whatever unsaved work I had on a website. If I want to paste I'll use the keyboard, Ctrl+Shift+V is perfectly fine. Why don't all you non gnome using gnome haters go somewhere else to complain?

chris_wot 13y ago
Why would your scroll wheel be a button? Sounds like hardware UX fail.
draven 13y ago
The wheel came after the button (ie there were 3 button mouses first and the middle button morphed into a button/scroll wheel hybrid later, there was nothing strictly scrolling related to the middle button before.)

Fice 13y ago

They are not simply removing middle-click paste function, but replacing it with something presumably more useful. What I learned from my own experience with GNOME 3 (I really like it) and from observing other people's reactions, is that we tend to overestimate the importance of our old habits and are willing to put more effort to protect them than it would take to change them (e.g. spending all day figuring out how to customize the UI while it would take an hour to get used to the defaults).

claudius 13y ago
It takes about 30 minutes top to install Xfce…
- Fice 13y ago
  And then spend the rest of the day configuring it to match the habits acquired with whatever desktop environment that was used before installing Xfce.

beijingcocktail 13y ago

Mddle click paste is one of the things that made me install Linux on my MacBook whrn I geniunlybtried to switch to OS X. For me at least, this feature significantly improves the UX. I use many times every day.

3amOpsGuy 13y ago

Middle paste has never been a reliable feature, (are you pasting from X clipboard or GNOME clipboard? - it changes depending on context). For that reason alone, i can see a case can be made for this change. At first glance it seems like a backward move to me, but i'd be at least willing to give the idea a try. GNOME 3 takes a lot of heat, they're one of the few actually pushing the envelope so it's to be expected i suppose. A little more encouragement and a little less boring complaints "stating the obvious" would go a long way.

pdkl95 13y ago

I have tried many times over the last decade or so to retire my current window manager of choice (Enlightenment DR16). The software hasn't been maintained significantly for most of that time, and several incompatibilities and problematic behavior with modern[1] software. I initially assumed this was only familiarity with my current environment and dependence on the various settings, tweaks, and shortcuts that build up over the years. Jumping into any other WM was obviously going to take some time to get used to, and finding out how to re-enable stuff like my preferred keys for switching virtual-desktop should only take a weekend to figure out and port over. All of the replacements ended up being reverted back to my working E16, usually because of either: creeping featurism/bloat slowing down or interfering with overall responsiveness, or this recent distressing trend to remove well-established features and behaviors. What's particularly distressing is that these problems seem to be getting worse with time. I gave up attempting to find a sane configuration for GNOME years ago due to their overall bloat and confusing and rarely-consistent style. Misfeatures like this mouse button change suggests they are now embracing the Microsoft-style "Principle of Maximal Surprise" style of software design. If you told me a decade ago that I'd be using the WM traditionally described as "unnecessary eye-candy" because it is faster than the other options, I wouldn't have believed you. If crap like changing the mouse buttons becomes wide-spread, though, I guess I'll be stuck using E16 for _another_ decade. At least I have a (mostly) working WM to fallback on, I suppose. The feature-removal drama in Firefox is quickly becoming far more problematic... [1]: "modern" being defined as "some time after Rasterman started teasing us with very-early E17 prototypes"

dredmorbius 13y ago
You've just described my situation, though my window manager is WindowMaker, not E. The lack of development is a feature. It works, its fast and stable, and there are very, very few surprises. I've tweaked it modestly with some appearance, behavior, and keybinding settings, otherwise its a very low-fuss configuration. And I've been using it for 16 years. That's a lot of familiarity.
sergiosgc 13y ago
Congratulations on managing to still have E16 running. I used it, then windowmaker, then gnome. When I tried to go back from gnome to E, all sorts of little things broke. I finally settled on i3. It is first strange, then estranged, then really great (it disappears, as any good desktop environment should).

chris_wot 13y ago

Imagine, if you will, that Gnome developers had control over keyboards. The first key to be removed would be sysreq, then scroll-lock, and break. And it was dubbed Keyboard 2.0 In Keyboard 2.1, the caps lock key was removed as you can use the shift key. The Windows key was surplus to requirements, there's a perfectly good alt key. Fast forward to Keyboard 3.0. There is no longer a control key (hold down alt for 2 seconds!), numlock is gone (the top row has numbers), cursor keys gone (you can use a mouse to move around). In Keyboard 3.1 they removed the shift key as stylistically capitals aren't necessary. in keyboard 3.2 they removed the comma and semicolon. these really aren't necessary as you don't need to pause when reading. in keyboard 3.3 there is no need for single quotes because you should not use contractions. that just causes confusion and besides the amount of debates and derision around it were getting ridiculous. justification: world peace and an end to grammar nazis. in keyboard 35 they are seriously considering removing the enter key the exclamation mark and any characters that require umlauts also they have removed the full stop because ideas dont exist in a vacuum so why should sentences as these are constructs of a narrow mind not to mention this will help with a cleaner text rendering codebase

lcedp 13y ago
It's funny that in your comment meaning to be as ridiculous as possible there are a few very sane ideas i.e. getting rid of caps lock and num lock keys which nobody uses and everybody is pissed of when they pressed accidentally.
- chris_wot 13y ago
  I find it funny that you think that "nobody" uses the caps lock key!
solnyshok 13y ago
I USE CAPSLOCK ALL THE TIME!!! :)
- chris_wot 13y ago
  I shall now write a blog post with dozens of links as to why my "no capitals" stance is the one and true way and you are wrong and unenlightened.

moron4hire 13y ago

I hated this feature of Gnome, but I will probably hate what they're replacing it with even more. I use the middle click to open links in new tabs and to close said tabs, and every other window manager I've used does it that way. What's next? Draw a small circle around the things you want to select with the cursor instead of left clicking on them?

inthewind 13y ago

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6281881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6281881

chris_wot 13y ago

From the bug report: (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. --- And there you have their use case. People who use IRC. Instead of giving an option of disabling middle clicking in the IRC application (or per-application) they will, instead, be removing this commonly used feature, because "won't someone think of the users?"

rbanffy 13y ago
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665193 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665193, in case anyone is wondering.

inthewind 13y ago

They'd probably be better off trying to jettison the keyboard to simplify the computer interface.

VLM 13y ago
... and the mouse, and the display... just SSH in. This closely resembles the herd of servers at my disposal. I find it a highly productive desktop environment / user interface.

JeremyNT 13y ago

I find the GNOME project fascinating to watch. Many users, myself included, have railed at the removal of things we have grown accustomed to. Some time ago, however, I decided to just give up and go along for the ride. Why not? These people surely have more UX experience than I do. Perhaps I don't really know best in this regard, even though I know what has worked for me in the past. Perhaps there are better ways. In fact, I find GNOME 3 is actually quite usable if one can manage to remove one's expectations based on prior versions. After the initial pain of "giving up" features I had become used to over the years, I found myself enjoying its simplicity. GNOME is a singular case study in its dogged determination to rapidly cull beloved features; indeed, I can't think of any other UI project of this size that has been so aggressive and so blind to user input. There are few things the GNOME team seems to hold sacred, and likewise they seem more than willing to alienate existing users and violate user expectations in the name of progress. I find this kind of blind determination and adherence to design goals at the cost of popularity admirable in its own way, although it seems that the project is doomed to find only a small niche due to this approach (which, honestly, is kind of a shame, since I find it quite pleasant to work with). Like everybody else who has integrated middle click paste into their workflows, I'm going to feel the pain from the removal of this feature. But I'm pretty sure I'll still be able to get my work done without it, and eventually I'll forget about it completely, and I'll be OK with whatever replaces it.

aday 13y ago

This issue has got blown out of proportion, and the facts have been totally lost. Nothing has been changed. Those of us in the GNOME project were working towards a slightly different solution, which would allow middle-click paste like functionality. That solution didn't work out for the next release (3.10), so we reinstated the old behaviour. Everyone needs to calm down. We're not going to simply remove middle-click paste.