GNOME 3.10 Released

GNOME 3.10 Released

Posted Sep 28, 2013 1:36 UTC (Sat) by torquay (guest, #92428)
In reply to: GNOME 3.10 Released by ebassi
Parent article: GNOME 3.10 Released

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.

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