what middle button does [LWN.net]

what middle button does

Posted Nov 10, 2011 1:29 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) by zzxtty
Parent article: Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register)

The operation you describe isn't copy/paste

It's select / paste-current-selection

These are distinct, one uses PRIMARY the other uses CLIPBOARD, except when running broken applications [or in the case of early Qt, a whole toolkit] that were designed by people who didn't know how this stuff works and tried to "fix" it to work how they thought it was supposed to, rather than reading the documentation and being enlightened.

(Or in the case of X-chat, they're copying a Windows app, which in turn cloned a Unix app which Windows users thought was "copying" data when it was selected... sigh)

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what middle button does

Posted Nov 10, 2011 4:42 UTC (Thu) by deepfire (subscriber, #26138) [Link]

I love the way your tour-de-force display of technical expertise is somehow appearing to cast a shadow on the position of the poster you're replying to. Or maybe I'm seeing ghosts?

In any case, I don't see how you added (refined, clarified) anything to the core thrust of his message.

And yes, I'm absolutely sure, that the details of PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD uses in Gnome 3 are technically impeccable.

what middle button does

Posted Nov 22, 2011 0:40 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

It's very common that people are annoyed about something because they thought they understood it, but in fact they didn't, and so now something has happened which they perceive as a disruption to the natural order of things, but in fact they just didn't understand in the first place.

Language Log provides a long stream of examples of people complaining of this or that "mistake" or "modernism" in English when in fact the supposed "error" can be traced back to impeccable English writers from centuries previous.

Most of the time it doesn't help, people go along believing that they're right and the whole world is wrong. But once in a while, just often enough to give hope, someone says "Oh, I see, how embarrassing" and learns a little bit more about the world.

what middle button does

Posted Nov 10, 2011 10:34 UTC (Thu) by zzxtty (subscriber, #45175) [Link]

Support (of what I consider to be the vastly superior) the "select / paste-current-selection" method is inconsistent (that's me being polite) on modern desktops. I'm now no longer sure what I'm going to get when I hit paste, sometimes the right thing, sometimes nothing, sometimes something from a week ago.

Ctrl + c was always used to send a SIGINT to a program, I always thought it odd when window managers started copying windows keyboard shortcuts.

I'm now trying to remember how we did handle copy/paste back in the days of twm/fvwm/olvwm, I seem to recall a whole bunch of clipboards that never kept in sync. The History of Copy and Paste - there's a book title for you, granted it probably won't be a best seller.

what middle button does

Posted Nov 25, 2011 19:33 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

I dunno what you count under modern desktops, then, for me Plasma at least has always been quite predictable thanks to Klipper... At least with Qt apps. Firefox, Chromium and some other GTK apps seem to screw up the clipboard sometimes (but surely not predictably, I'm not even sure it's them).