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GNOME 3.10 ReleasedGNOME 3.10 ReleasedPosted Sep 27, 2013 13:34 UTC (Fri) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855)In reply to: GNOME 3.10 Released by Cyberax Parent article: GNOME 3.10 Released
Why has it ever been invented? it was an easter egg, back in the time when the ICCCM mandated a PRIMARY and a SECONDARY selection, and everyone was implementing copy and paste on X11 as they wanted, mostly by copying random behaviours from random applications, and no two applications behaved consistently. these days, with a proper specification, and with SECONDARY gone, the only vestigial role PRIMARY has is to confuse newcomers and convince them that copy and paste in X11/Linux is broken, compared to other, more successful platforms. well, that and provide a sense of smug, hipsterish superiority for neckbeards who discovered this easter egg twenty years ago, and that can now scream bloody murder as soon as toolkit developers start questioning why are we still carrying baggage of crappy workarounds to broken applications — or, as Slashdot and Hacker News call them: their audience.
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GNOME 3.10 Released Posted Sep 27, 2013 13:41 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
That's not fair. It serves a valuable purpose, of impressing Windows/Mac users: "Hey, how did you do that?" (on seeing me copy-paste from mouse, hand never venturing near keyboard.) Why use Linux if not to impress people?
(ot -- people are also impressed with my text formatting on emacs. People are easily impressed.)
The point someone else brought up, of ^C meaning something else on Unix, is valid too.
GNOME 3.10 Released Posted Sep 27, 2013 13:45 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Wow. This is a direct attack on people who have been using a particular mode of interaction for a long time (it predates ICCCM, BTW) and who are understandably upset when a successful work pattern gets broken. Why try to understand why your users are unhappy when you can call them "smug hipsterish neckbeards" and ignore what they are trying to tell you?
GNOME 3.10 Released Posted Sep 27, 2013 13:59 UTC (Fri) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] can call them "smug hipsterish neckbeards" and ignore what they are trying to tell you when I read tripe and hyperbole like: "a feature that has made Unix/X culturally superior to Windows/Mac since the beginning of time", my only reaction is to use "smug hipsterish neckbeards" as a retort. it's either that, or a whoopie cushion sound. "culturally superior" is just code for the elitist "fuck you, got mine" attitude; it's easy to dismiss these people out of hand, because it's exactly the same attitude that says that every other OS is wrong, and every other user who gets confused by features that lead to destructive patterns "were not smart enough" for Linux. it's the usual "exclusive club" claptrap that I've been dealing with since I started using Linux 15 years ago - and that makes companies like Google and Canonical dissociate their products from the Linux brand as fast as they can possibly run. as for everyone else using "middle click to paste", I don't particularly care; it's an easter egg, and if I ever have to vote whether or not it should stay in GTK+ (yes, it's implemented by the toolkits, these days) then I'll probably abstain. I'd absolutely vote yes to disabling it by default, because not easter egg is worth people pasting wrong links in bug reports, disclosing private information on websites, or in general losing data.
GNOME 3.10 Released Posted Sep 27, 2013 14:40 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] when I read tripe and hyperbole like: "a feature that has made Unix/X culturally superior to Windows/Mac since the beginning of time"As the one who wrote that: *whoosh* Yes, I believe Unix-like is better, for this and other reasons. No, I don't believe time started in the 1980s. And I used Windows (3.1) before I used Linux (kernel 1.2.3, I think).
GNOME 3.10 Released Posted Sep 27, 2013 14:47 UTC (Fri) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] As the one who wrote that: *whoosh* you may have written it in a purposefully hyperbolic manner; I have read and heard people that say that with a straight face, and I've have done so for the past month and a half, when this whole affair was blown off the rails after the commit the reverted the "off by default" setting was pushed to Git.
GNOME 3.10 Released Posted Sep 27, 2013 14:50 UTC (Fri) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
The problem is not you just going
> smug hipsterish neckbeards
(which I might just as well be, I don't know)
But when you call a feature an "easter egg" (middle-click and multiple selections are useful for people that cut and paste a lot of text), you are just being specious.
GNOME 3.10 Released Posted Sep 29, 2013 14:38 UTC (Sun) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] I'm really not being "specious": middle click to paste the PRIMARY selection is an Easter egg for "experienced users" (whatever that may mean, or whoever those may be), as the X11 clipboard specification puts it. I suggest looking at the various discussions that led to the specification being formalised.
GNOME 3.10 Released Posted Sep 29, 2013 14:57 UTC (Sun) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
>> specious. (adj.) 1. apparently good or right though lacking real merit; superficially pleasing or plausible: specious arguments.
The clipboard specification you linked is not X11's, but Freedesktop.org's... which was discussed and formalized more or less twenty to thirty years after ICCCM was discussed and formalized. So, yes, you were not being specious: you were plagiarizing someone being specious... :)
As I wrote in another post, when I was introduced to mice in the 1980s, that's what was said to me: "this button selects, this pastes, and this opens a context-sensitive menu". This is the simplest possible way to use a mouse, especially if you copy and paste a lot of text in your workflow.
Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V came many years after.
GNOME 3.10 Released Posted Sep 29, 2013 18:26 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Quite. Things are not "easter eggs" if they are used by the overwhelming majority of users of that environment, and widely documented. Middle-click to paste is *not* an easter egg. Heck, it was the first thing I ever learned about X, before I even learned how to start an xterm!
It's culturally transmitted knowledge, sure. So is the do { ... } while(0) pattern for statement-like macros in C. Maybe we should remove that too?
GNOME 3.10 Released Posted Sep 28, 2013 1:36 UTC (Sat) by torquay (guest, #92428) [Link] There might be a middle ground here (no pun intended). In my experience I've found the middle-click-to-paste to be a mixture of useful and annoying at the same time. It some contexts it's good as a paste shortcut, and in other contexts it has inconsistent and/or imprecise behavior. In terminals it only pastes at the current cursor position, while in GUI-based editors/wordprocessors it generally pastes where the mouse points. In the former case it's clear where the text is going to end up. In the latter case I often get the position wrong: +-1 character (to left/right) and less often +-1 line; this necessitates an undo operation, where I then either try again with middle-click-to-paste, or manually move the cursor and use control-V to paste. The above issue has obviously negated all the time savings of using the middle-click-to-paste, in contrast to an explicit copy'n'paste operation via Control-c and Control-v. It also brings up another bug/misfeature: the selection on the screen is often not what's in the clipboard, causing Control-v to paste something other than I intended. (This is the "two clipboards problem", for which there are workarounds. Why not just have one clipboard by default ?) There are also other issues with middle-click-to-paste, such as the default behavior in Firefox: an accidental middle-click-to-paste in the middle of page is highly confusing to users. "Why did the browser just go to different page? Linux seems broken!". Here accidental means either imprecise positioning, or simply pressing the middle button instead of the left or right one (people have fat fingers or aren't paying attention - their simple mistakes should not have drastic effects). Simply removing or disabling middle-click-to-paste is not the best solution. Firstly, we need to take into account that a large portion of the existing user base used to the current behavior. Secondly, there are cases where middle-click-to-paste is both useful and precise. The proposed middle ground solution is as follows. Whenever middle-click-to-paste is used within a GUI-based editor or wordprocessor, the cursor is first moved to where the mouse is pointing (so the user can clearly see where the action is going to take place) and a small context menu pops up asking "Paste [first few letters of selection]... here?". A second middle-click is used to confirm the action, and any other click (or pressing escape) cancels the action. For terminals, the current behavior can stay as is, since it's not ambiguous and/or imprecise. I've saved a lot of time that way. For software such as Firefox, the action of middle-click-to-paste within the page should be either disabled by default, or a context menu is used to ask the user if they really want to navigate to page xyz. The behavior of doing middle-click-to-paste within the URL dialog would follow the dialog used for editors outlined above.
GNOME 3.10 Released Posted Sep 28, 2013 3:52 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> an accidental middle-click-to-paste in the middle of page is highly confusing to users.
I agree, especially when combined with the middle click on a URL opens a new tab instead of a new window. managing to miss the URL takes you off to some other page (or an error, depending on what's in the clipboard)
this is always one of the first things I disable on firefox, unfortunantly it's only possible through the about:config interface (search for middle and then change middlemouse.contentLoadURL to false)
But this is just a case of one application (firefox) doing silly things.
GNOME 3.10 Released Posted Oct 1, 2013 14:51 UTC (Tue) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link]
DO dig deeper, mr Bassi.
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