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Use clipboard, not cut buffer

Posted Aug 15, 2005 3:49 UTC (Mon) by Zarathustra (guest, #26443)
In reply to: Use clipboard, not cut buffer by jdub
Parent article: GTK+ 2.8.0 released

I don't care who you are targeting with Gnome, because we will both agree that it's not me. I have no problem with that, I don't use Gnome, and I'm happy.

But if GTK is a "cross-platform" toolkit, as others have claimed, then when it runs on a Unix platform, it better behave according to the Unix rules and conventions.

And I say this both as a Unix user that uses applications that happen to use GTK, and as a developer that considers GTK an option for writing cross platform applications.

The GTK developers seem to think that Unix == Gnome, and honestly, Al Viro said it best:

judging by the GNOME codebase the people who designed GNOME are culturally incompatible with UNIX.

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Posted Aug 15, 2005 4:01 UTC (Mon) by jdub (subscriber, #27) [Link]

Well, let's get beyond the bile and look at what all of this means: Why do you perceive GTK+/GNOME developers to be anti-UNIX, or somehow incapable of writing software that conforms to your definition of UNIX-like? I'd be keen to find out what else defines UNIX-like to you (beyond the usual "small tools that work together" mantra).

(And for the record, aiming our sights at the 99.999% of users who are not like us makes the software better for us as we go - see the dramatic rise in geek use of Mac OS X for evidence enough of this.)

Use clipboard, not cut buffer

Posted Aug 15, 2005 12:37 UTC (Mon) by tgb (guest, #745) [Link]

The problem as I see it is that "legacy" X apps support a certain way of working (ctrl+a, ctrl+e, middle-click-paste etc.). As GTK+ is a cross-platform toolkit, it should support the same keybindings that people on their current platform are used to. X-style cut/paste/keybindings should work under X, in the same way as Ctrl+C should copy text under Windows, in the same way as Command+C does the same under Mac OS.

Any truly-cross-platform toolkit, IMHO, should change to fit in with the way people already work in that specific environment. It should be the toolkit, not the person, changing to fit an environment.

Use clipboard, not cut buffer

Posted Aug 15, 2005 18:15 UTC (Mon) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link]

The GTK developers seem to think that Unix == Gnome, and honestly, Al Viro said it best:

judging by the GNOME codebase the people who designed GNOME are culturally incompatible with UNIX.

That's hardly surprising. Remember, Gnu's Not Unix, and it shows.

Now, I happen to like some of the extra flags and options that the GNU tools (talking command line here) provide over standard Unix, on the other hand they do tend to take it to ridiculous extremes. And I really don't like that they expect me to use an EMACS-like info-browser to find out what some of those flags and options do, rather than putting that information in the man page where it belongs.

But what can you expect? RMS grew up on a DECSystem, not a Unix box. Nothing wrong with that, it's just different.