On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 7:14 AM, Joshua Juran <jju...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Jul 5, 2008, at 6:48 AM, Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote: >> >> The dazzling brilliance of X11 select-to-copy and middleclick- >> to-paste is nowhere as blinding as when dealing with URLs. X11 is >> atrocious in many ways, but this is something that it got so, >> *so* *right* it's enough to spoil me for any other GUI that does >> not have this. Even the searing hatefulness of the overall X11 >> clipboard situation (that, inconceivably, persists to this day) >> can do little to diminish the blazing glory of these selection- >> related gestures. > > So if you accidently click somewhere you lose the clipboard contents, and if > you accidentally middle-click in the wrong place you've just splatted random > text into an unrelated document, or maybe your shell? HATE.
It's worse than that. X11's selection buffer breaks a whole lot stuff if you, you know, actually use it and don't treat it like the vestigal feature it is. A common behavior that this mechanism breaks is to copy a piece of text (say, from a terminal window) and go over to a text input box (say, the google search box in firefox) to paste it. If I planned to use the "highlight and middle click strategy" I now have a problem; how to get rid of the text that's already in the search box. If I do the natural action (triple click to select all contents) I've just wiped out the contents of my selection buffer. Great, so I remove the text, go back to my terminal, reselect my text, and now I can go paste it. Or, I can do the reflexive action for any unix user, which is to hit ^U. Except that we're talking about firefox here, where they've decided that they no longer need to support that feature. It gets better. ^U is the firefox view source command, so I've now got a new window open (probably showing me about:blank's source) and I still haven't done anything about the text in that pesky search box. So, I do what I normally do when I find myself in this exact situation (which, thanks to muscle memory and normally using a sane platform that has only one way to copy and paste) which is to click at the beginning of the text and hold down delete until it's gone. No matter how you slice that, it's hateful. In *some* applications (terminal emulators) it's desirable to automatically copy the text, but even that is starting to break down now, thanks to some of the added features in modern terminal emulators. Opening a URL is now as simple as ctrl-clicking on it, or right clicking and selecting "Open in Browser". In Apple's terminal program, I can right click a selection and search it in google, or use the services menu to do any number of tasks. It won't be long until one of the desktop environments copies this feature, and then the others will. Of course, those features will lead to hate of their own. (Don't even get me started on the shift-insert schism, where in some applications it pastes from the selection buffer while in other applications it pastes from the clipboard. This also applies to the "does this application insert text where the text input cursor is, or where the mouse happens to be when you middle click" problem.) -Zach
