LWN: Comments on "GNOME 3.10 Released"

shift-Insert pastes too

sdalley — 2013-10-04T11:11:57+00:00

> and middle-click-paste at least as discoverable as any of those things
> (and trivial to have the menu item for paste say that middle click will do
> it as well if you are really worried.

And let's not forget that paste can also be done with shift-Insert

This also avoids use of the mouse, of course.

GNOME 3.10 Released

Arker — 2013-10-02T13:43:14+00:00

Well at the moment I have two working mice (I tend to be hard on them) - one is an el cheapo not sure where I got it, the other is a moderately expensive Pixxo gaming mouse I ordered and had shipped - neither one has a satisfactory middle button, but either one will work if I am slow and careful with it. Just not conducive to fast workflow, which is where the middle click should shine.

GNOME 3.10 Released

Arker — 2013-10-02T12:40:06+00:00

"The problem is not accidentally selecting while middle-clicking, but accidentally selecting while clicking normally. For example, you might click the address bar, hold down backspace to clear it (itself very irritating, as the more natural "triple-click and hit delete" idiom will also blow out your copy/paste buffer), then middle-click in the blank address bar."

You are attempting to use this like a two-step copy paste and it just isnt. So forget about your copy/paste buffer, that isnt even involved in the yank. You have to clear the space before you start, since there is one step, not two, it is not possible to insert a step between the steps, when there is only one step.

"A more common problem, for me anyway, is that I have a habit of (a) selecting text while reading long pages as a way of bookmarking my position while scrolling or checking other windows, and (b) selecting text to delete/overwrite it. It is frustrating that both these activities lose data from the paste buffer, especially when trying to overwrite text from the clipboard."

But they dont. The paste buffer is unaffected. You access it with shift-insert or ctrl-v or meta-v or whatever you have that mapped to - the middle shift yank uses the primary selection, NOT the paste buffer!

GNOME 3.10 Released

jospoortvliet — 2013-10-02T07:58:17+00:00

KDE apps feature this x icon at the end of every text input which does exactly that - a middle click on it will empty the field and replace its contents with what was in the buffer while a click somewhere in the field will insert. Firefox (and every other app/platform lacking this) is to blame for not having this totally simple and obvious feature... reminds me of how session management was badly implemented and then blamed for not working, thus removed. Ignorance is bliss...

GNOME 3.10 Released

dlang — 2013-10-02T03:10:06+00:00

I tend to buy cheap ($5 or so) mice and haven't had any problems like you are describing. your mileage will vary, so I'm not disputing that you are having problems, but I'm surprised it's a lot of hunting

GNOME 3.10 Released

apoelstra — 2013-10-02T00:00:50+00:00

I've had this problem with some mice which have very small scroll increments (typically they make a clicking sound) and which compensate by only sending scroll signals to the PC every 3 or 4 clicks.

With, e.g. the Microsoft white mice I have never had this problem.

It's unfortunately an issue of stupid design rather than build quality, so you can't avoid the problem by just buying expensive mice.

GNOME 3.10 Released

hummassa — 2013-10-01T21:06:02+00:00

> It's unnecessarily hard to push it without also scrolling at the same time, however

at the house we have some cheap mice, and not one of us has this complaint... the movements (clicking versus scrolling) are just too different.

GNOME 3.10 Released

Arker — 2013-10-01T20:08:08+00:00

You can only use ctrl-c to copy on a *nix system if you have installed some sort of windows keybindings. I cant completely call for the destruction of such keybindings (I get forced to spend way too much time in windows and therefore use them myself) but please dont mistakenly think they are somehow native keybindings.

Also you wont over-ride the selection unless you click the wrong button. Move the mouse, then middle click, without left clicking, and you should have no difficulty. Unless your mouse, like most, doesnt have a real middle button and instead you are trying to press on the scrollwheel. Which often winds up with the wheel spinning and your finger colliding with the wrong button.

THAT is what often happens with me, and aside from being more careful the only solution is to hunt really hard until you find a decent mouse.

GNOME 3.10 Released

Arker — 2013-10-01T19:55:48+00:00

It's a poor but not entirely useless substitute for a real third button. It's unnecessarily hard to push it without also scrolling at the same time, however. Proper mice with three real buttons do exist but they are hard to find.

GNOME 3.10 Released

jubal — 2013-10-01T14:51:54+00:00

DO dig deeper, mr Bassi.

GNOME 3.10 Released

jwakely — 2013-09-30T18:52:48+00:00

[Having just used select-and-middle-click to select this text to quote...]

> right-click-paste as done by putty is a good example of surprising behaviour, because right click is used for lots of other things normally.

The very first thing I do when installing putty is change the settings to paste with middle-click!

Easter egg my ***.

GNOME 3.10 Released

Neowin — 2013-09-30T05:08:22+00:00

The biggest joke of GNOME is that, its founder, Miguel de Icaza doesn't bother to give a shit to deeply fragmented Linux desktop platform any more.

GNOME 3.10 Released

efitton — 2013-09-30T00:49:16+00:00

In essence, despite the disparaging comments and implications that the slashdot forum was wrong, GNOME designers are looking at replacing middle click paste with “something better.”

Why obfuscate? Why not just admit that designers are looking at doing just that but will make sure that tweak tool will override and this change to gtk+ won’t impact other environments. I have to imagine there would have been much less brouhaha.

And as this is only my second comment on lwn.net despite having lurked corbet’s excellent writing for a dozen years you might doubt my persona (which shouldn’t actually change the validity of my reasoning *cough*). I would be Eric Fitton the math teacher and owner of efitton.net.

GNOME 3.10 Released

Cyberax — 2013-09-29T22:31:12+00:00

Any Synaptics touchpad can be configured to emulate middle-click if you click on a special zone.

GNOME 3.10 Released

dlang — 2013-09-29T22:11:39+00:00

with at least a couple brands of laptops it didn't require any special driver. The system apparently saw it the same as a mouse wheel on a normal mouse. this wasn't just a matter of 'use the edge' there was actually a ridge separating the 'wheel' portion from the main portion, and tapping on the wheel portion clicked the third button.

GNOME 3.10 Released

khim — 2013-09-29T22:04:26+00:00

I also see laptops with the edge of their touchpad configured to act as a scroll wheel, that's a third button.

Are you sure? I've worked with a few such models, and yes, touchpad was able to emulate scroll well (in fact you can pick if you want edge scroll or two-finger scroll), but it was not able to emulate third button. What kind of driver do you need to enable this functionality?

GNOME 3.10 Released

dlang — 2013-09-29T21:53:48+00:00

I see a very large percentage of the people who are using laptops using them as a portable desktop, i.e. they take it from one location with a keyboard/mouse/monitor to another similarly equipped.

I also see a lot of the users who use their laptops in other places pull out a 'real' mouse and plug it in.

No, it's not every laptop, but it's a rather large percentage of laptop users.

I also see laptops with the edge of their touchpad configured to act as a scroll wheel, that's a third button.

It's not nearly as uncommon to have a third button as you think.

GNOME 3.10 Released

nix — 2013-09-29T18:26:21+00:00

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

hummassa — 2013-09-29T15:47:54+00:00

1. yes
2. yes, more or less: at my home we have four current laptops: a MacBook, an Acer, a Sony, and a HP; the Mac has a gesture (three-finger tap), the Acer has a physical third button/"mouse wheel" (it's actually a five-way clickable joystick thingy), the Sony and the HP both have two pysical buttons, but you can click on both at the same time and get the "third button" effect.
3. actually, at the "shop", where we have some 300 laptops, I haven't ever seen one of them without an external mouse; apparently, politicians can't use the trackpads to save their lives... :-D

GNOME 3.10 Released

rsidd — 2013-09-29T15:34:34+00:00

I have news for you.

1. For many years now, laptops have outsold desktops. Today the margin isn't close.

2. Very few laptops come with three-button trackpads.

3. Very few laptop users buy mice to use with their laptops. If they are dissatisfied with the trackpad's accuracy (graphics professionals, for example) they are more likely to buy a Wacom tablet or something.

GNOME 3.10 Released

hummassa — 2013-09-29T14:57:10+00:00

>> 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

hummassa — 2013-09-29T14:47:43+00:00

> The question here, to me, is very simple. Why design a new feature around a button that hardly exists on most new machines?

I just went to my favorite hardware vendor website.
Clicked "peripherals/mice"

Every single mouse for sale there had three or more buttons.

(you do know that the mouse wheel is a clickable button, don't you? you can roll up, down, or click)

GNOME 3.10 Released

ebassi — 2013-09-29T14:38:46+00:00

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

rsidd — 2013-09-29T14:34:18+00:00

The question here, to me, is very simple. Why design a new feature around a button that hardly exists on most new machines? On machines that have a middle button, some Linux users use it to paste. On machines (the majority today) that don't have a middle button, most users don't miss it, but a few Linux users either emulate it with simultaneous left-right, or buy an additional three-button mouse. Why not leave them alone?

And yes, this may be seen by some as flamebait, but there is another question I have: has GNOME 3 won significant numbers of new users, as opposed to users who have simply upgraded from GNOME 2 and not jumped ship? (Unity certainly has, due to Ubuntu's popularity on the desktop.)

GNOME 3.10 Released

ovitters — 2013-09-29T12:39:14+00:00

The idea is to think about something better. Kind of obvious. That some people or GNOME developers are worried is logical. This is with every change. The middle click paste was gone in one gtk+ release, back in the next. I hated the brief period it wasn't working. But I changed the setting in gnome-tweak-tool and before I could ask about it, the setting was reverted.

Just because a few people (usually the same, though sometimes they switch accounts) here suggest that I am always "pro" whatever, it might be good to not assume things are black and white.

And if you're quoting from that thread, why not quote the response where I clearly stated that a lot of people hate the change? Is that also not a bit political to leave this out in your response to me?

GNOME 3.10 Released

efitton — 2013-09-29T02:45:07+00:00

Allan never actually denied that middle click paste was being removed. In fact, no gnome developer has actually refuted the removal of middle click paste (including you). What was said is that the design isn’t finished and now isn’t the time to talk about it. And the way it was phrased is frankly political talk worthy of the evening news. It sounds like a denial but isn’t. I also notice you didn’t link to the gnome developers in the same thread who are worried about the change.

Other reasons to believe middle click paste is going away:
https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/Selections
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665193
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536271#c3
https://twitter.com/johandahlin/status/141848448973549569
https://lwn.net/Articles/568601/

GNOME 3.10 Released

dlang — 2013-09-29T00:19:06+00:00

Yes, sometimes it works, sometimes not.

all too frequently, the URL now has spaces (or quote characters) added at the beginning of each line that will prevent the broawser from DTRT

GNOME 3.10 Released

james — 2013-09-28T17:33:43+00:00

Have you tried pasting the entire broken URL into the address bar, line-breaks and all? Most GUI browsers will (attempt to) DTRT and remove the line-breaks for you.

GNOME 3.10 Released

dlang — 2013-09-28T03:52:11+00:00

> 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

torquay — 2013-09-28T01:36:49+00:00

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

dlang — 2013-09-27T22:37:11+00:00

speak for yourself, I frequently need to paste in URLs in multiple steps when people send me links that are extremely long and so get broken across lines.

admittedly, this is mostly a case of appending to the URL rather than inserting in the middle, but I've had reasons to do that as well.

a paste should either insert the text whereever the cursor currently is (my preference) or insert it where the pointer is (fallback), it should never blindly replace everything with a new thing if you didn't tell it ot

GNOME 3.10 Released

cortana — 2013-09-27T20:35:23+00:00

> If you Middle-click, it just appends (or inserts, depending on where you middle-click) the selection in the point where you middle-clicked.

Which is useless. I want to replace the address with the contents of the PRIMARY selection. Inserting a new URL in the middle of an old one is *never* what I want to d.

GNOME 3.10 Released

cortana — 2013-09-27T20:33:53+00:00

Don't forget the programs who confuse the two operations so that sometimes selecting text overwrites the CLIPBOARD as well as the PRIMARY selection. XChat, I'm looking at you. And I think Mozilla historically did this as well. No wonder the users are confused--even developers can't always get it right!

GNOME 3.10 Released

luya — 2013-09-27T18:21:28+00:00

Still available via Tweak Tool. I never knew this functionality existed.

GNOME 3.10 Released

hummassa — 2013-09-27T16:45:11+00:00

> those things are only 'simple' if you expect them.

QUOTE

Hi, this is a mouse. It has three buttons:

The Select button, the Paste button, and the Menu button.

ENDQUOTE

This is how the mouse was introduced to me in the late 1980s. I don't know how can it be made any simpler than that.

GNOME 3.10 Released

apoelstra — 2013-09-27T15:57:33+00:00

<blockquote>“Slightly”? You must move it all the way out of address bar! If you try move you pointer with middle button clicked it'll be just ignored (mouse cursor is frozen when that happens). Just middle-click again — and you are golden!</blockquote>

The problem is not accidentally selecting while middle-clicking, but accidentally selecting while clicking normally. For example, you might click the address bar, hold down backspace to clear it (itself very irritating, as the more natural "triple-click and hit delete" idiom will also blow out your copy/paste buffer), then middle-click in the blank address bar.

I think, this is why Firefox treats middle-clicking in the middle of the page as a "go to URL" signal. IMHO this convenience is not really worth the suprise of Firefox jumping pages every time you miss a text box. (Pentadactyl and vimperator users can just hit 'p' or 'P' to the same effect, which is harder to do by accident.)

A more common problem, for me anyway, is that I have a habit of (a) selecting text while reading long pages as a way of bookmarking my position while scrolling or checking other windows, and (b) selecting text to delete/overwrite it. It is frustrating that both these activities lose data from the paste buffer, especially when trying to overwrite text from the clipboard.

I love middle-click-to-copy, but it could certainly be improved. Maybe if you had to use the right mouse button while dragging to copy text, that would avoid these conflicts and also prevent users who are unaware of it from accidentally using it.

GNOME 3.10 Released

hummassa — 2013-09-27T14:50:58+00:00

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

ebassi — 2013-09-27T14:47:52+00:00

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

rsidd — 2013-09-27T14:40:36+00:00

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

khim — 2013-09-27T14:11:02+00:00

It's just that when the address bar already has text, your click may be mistaken as a selection if the pointing device simultaneously moves slightly.

“Slightly”? You must move it all the way out of address bar! If you try move you pointer with middle button clicked it'll be just ignored (mouse cursor is frozen when that happens). Just middle-click again — and you are golden!

The ease of accidentally overriding the selection seems like a fundamental limitation of the select+middleclick technique.

All such problems in my experience come from keyboards/mices which don't have a middle button and where you can accidentally generate left click or right click instead of middle click.

What really kills me that on Linux, ctrl-C has dual purpose, the other usage is to send INT to process, and the other is to perform a copy operation.

Yup. And that is why I use trackpoint in combination with middle click. Works fine in most cases (except crazy Java programs, but they are not Linux programs, they tend to try to invent their own way of doing everything anyway).