[Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[Eyal Teutsch]

Must say that like many others I had the habit of double clicking a URL in 
order to copy it - a task which I repeatedly do in my work as to paste the URL 
in a text editor in order to track report URLs which I'm spawning via the 
terminal.
It seems to me that the fact that many users relied on this "accidental" 
feature, should cause a change in mind and make it an actual feature.

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Title:
  double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

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[Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[Peter Boström]

Thanks, filed: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=786935

** Bug watch added: GNOME Bug Tracker #786935
   https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=786935

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Title:
  double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

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[Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[Egmont Koblinger]

Ctrl+click opens the URL in your preferred browser.

Do you often need to copy the URL into your clipboard instead? I guess
Ctrl+Shift+click could be made to do that, sounds reasonable to me
(although will be a hard to discover feature).

Could you please file a feature request at bugzilla.gnome.org to keep
track of this (and also hear the main maintainer's opinion)?

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Title:
  double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

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[Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[Peter Boström]

For me selecting a link using double click is faster than using the
right-click context menu (overall don't like menus as I can't use them
quickly). To me that's a regression (I can't select URLs as fast as I
used to), but that doesn't mean that bringing back the old double-click
behavior is the right fix.

Is it feasible that a single-click shortcut that could be used for this
context-menu option? For me something like ctrl+click or shift+click on
a URL instead of using the right-click menu would be acceptable (and
probably preferrable to my original double-click + ctrl+shift+c workflow
as it's fewer actions / faster).

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Title:
  double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

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[Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[Egmont Koblinger]

If you want an apple, as for an apple. If you want a pear, ask for a
pear. What you do is you want a pear, yet you ask for an apple and
expect to receive the kind of apple that tastes as close to pear as
possible. And even though you can configure the kind of the apple you'll
receive, it's still not good enough for you, you wish that Ubuntu by
default configures to deliver your favorite kind of apple, the one that
tastes the closest to pears. You keep ignoring that you could actually
ask for a pear if that's what you want, or that the default kind of
apple was decided by those who actually want an apple apple, not a pear-
ish apple.

(In case it's not clear: apple = select a word; kind of apple = the
configured characters that should be considered part of a word; pear =
select a URL.)

> > Double clicking, by design, is _not_ meant to select URLs.

> Really? Which design is that?

I've checked the behavior of the following apps for you: Terminal
emulators: Linux console + gpm, xterm, urxvt, konsole, st, pterm,
terminology, mlterm; browsers: Firefox, Chrome and Opera, and in each of
them a non-hyperlinked URL as part of a rendered page, a simple
textarea, as well as Gmail's compose window; other apps: LibreOffice
Writer (hyperlink removed), gedit.

Guess what: Out of these urxvt is the only one that selects URLs on
double click. Plus xterm and konsole are the ones that work as gnome-
terminal used to work (including the bugs you're aware of: due to only
looking at the characters individually, quite often they don't correctly
recognize URLs because they simply don't care about URLs when you double
click). All the other apps select a shorter segment of the URL.

So you ask what design it is... well, it is the design of most of the
apps out there.

You're perfectly aware that what gnome-terminal used to do was far from
perfect, it made mistakes many times. Example: Let's take a URL with a
trailing dot, such as this sentence: "For details see
http://example.com/whatever.html.; Hover underlining does exclude the
trailing dot, and similarly the right-click menu's Open/Copy Link
actions exclude it too. It was never possible to do the same with double
clicking. Either the dot character is included in the set of word
characters, in which case the trailing dot is included, or it is
excluded from the set, in which case double clicking also stops the
selection at the middle of the domain name, or before the extension.

Apart from urxvt, I don't think any terminal emulators implement a more
sophisticated algorithm for double clicking, and with their current
approach (looking at characters individually) it is just not possible to
make it right.

gnome-terminal/vte has never implemented anything more sophisticated
either, and has no such bug entry and I can't recall any TODO about it
either. If it was ever agreed that double clicking should recognize and
highlight URLs, I'm absolutely certain there would be a bug entry about
it, or it would already be implemented. This is a clear proof that
double clicking was never meant to select URLs. This is not my personal
opinion, this is a fact. Double clicking is meant to aid conveniently
select logical parts of any regular text (not URLs), such as the output
of a grep, gcc, whatever command.

> And regardless of whether or not double click is meant to select URLs,
> it's a literal fact that it did in fact (largely) select URLs for many
> years.

The key is "largely" here.

In previous gnome-terminal versions double clicking on a URL selected it
properly with a perhaps (wild guess) let's say 90% accuracy. Is this a
reasonable guess? (The trailing dot discrepancy mentioned above is just
one of the many cases where double clicking's plain stupid algorithm
gave different result than the complex URL regex.)

Myself being a software engineer (actually a recent active contributor
to gnome-terminal/vte), you're never going to get my buy-in for
something that works 90% of the time. Never. I'm not going to approve
something that "largely" works. I might approve something that "always"
works, or with an as small error rate as inevitable.

Adding back ":" to wordchars is the "workaround" of the best
gain:investment ratio that you could do now on your computer (1 minute
investment, gain is that it works ~90% of the cases for you), but is
definitely not a solution suitable for mainstream.

And let's not forget that while adding ":" would sorta-kinda but not
fully solve your problem, it would break the workflow of many other
people (who actually use double click for what it was designed for).

I cannot understand why you ask for making it work about 90% of the
time, for bringing back that broken implementation, and I really don't
feel like continuing the discussion in this direction.

What I would understand (I probably still wouldn't agree with you, but
it would make sense to have a nice discussion) is if you asked for URLs
to be highlighted on double-click exactly as they are already 

Re: [Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[James Troup]

Egmont Koblinger  writes:

> Double clicking, by design, is _not_ meant to select URLs.

Really?  Which design is that?

And regardless of whether or not double click is meant to select URLs,
it's a literal fact that it did in fact (largely) select URLs for many
years.

> So, guys, there's nothing to see here. Please move on.

You're obviously welcome to your opinion, but it's a little strange to
end 77 lines and 705 words with the claim that there is "nothing to
see here" and a request to "move on".

> This bug should be closed as invalid.

That's your opinion; in my opinion this is a regression in Ubuntu.

-- 
James

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Title:
  double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

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[Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[Egmont Koblinger]

I "love" how much people still complain and fail to understand the
previous comments...

So let me try it once again...

Double clicking, by design, is _not_ meant to select URLs.

Double clicking selects a continuous sequence of certain (configurable)
characters, and it has do be able to do this even when you double click
outside of a URL.

At one point this configurability was removed, but due to popular demand
(that is: plenty of complaints) it was brought back in the very next
version (alas as a hidden setting, without a UI).

There were many debates around what the default set of such characters
should be, and the reason it is configurable is because there's no
single right answer, it's a matter of taste, or rather, a matter of use
cases. The only clear conclusion was that generally it's better to have
fewer characters in the set rather than more, that is, double clicking
should rather select shorter segments than long ones. This is because if
it selects a shorter section than desired, it is still easy to double-
click and then drag the mouse to extend it by other sections, whereas
the other way around this cannot be done.

This was the reason behind the removal of ":" from the default set, and
continuing this trend if we were to change anything, it would much
rather be the removal of "/" too rather than adding ":" back.

If we removed "/" too, it would mean that double clicking on a URL would
highlight even much shorter parts of it: either the hostname only, or
one path component only. Would you still complain then that it's broken,
or would it be more obvious to you and easier for you to accept that
double clicking is not designed for selecting a URL?

As stated above, if you add ":" to the set (which you can do easily), it
would still not perfectly select URLs, there would be differences
("bugs" if you will). Double clicking behavior is very simple: certain
characters are selected, while the rest are not, without looking at the
larger picture. URLs, on the other hand, are wy more complex to
detect. See https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-terminal/tree/src
/terminal-regex.h?h=gnome-3-22 to get an idea how crazily heavily
complex the regular expressions are, and it's still not perfect (it's
not even possible to get it perfect since it's not defined anywhere how
to detect the boundaries of a URL in a text flow), but is quite good.

Theoretically the code could be changed to select based on characters
when double clicking outside a URL, and the entire URL when clicking
inside. But this dual behavior would be even more confusing (i.e.
broken). Then the currently available and luckily configurable set of
word characters would be ignored within URLs (and what if let's say you
actually wanted to easily highlight parts of the URL and hence you
removed "/" from wordchars? you'd find that it doesn't work) whereas
you'd get another way of copying the URL for which you already have one
method.

Also, beginning with Yakkety gnome-terminal recognizes numbers, and even
though (as opposed to URLs) it doesn't highlight them on mouseover, it
provides useful information on a right click. So then should this one
also modify the double click behavior to stop at number boundaries? Why
or why not?

There is a way to conveniently copy an entire URL, and this is in the
right-click menu.

Double clicking was never meant to do this, and modifying double
clicking to do this would cause more harm than good, or at the very
least definitely more inconsistency and less configurability.

Adding ":" back to the list of word chars wouldn't fix the issue (there
would still be cases when the URL is not detected properly) and would
cause other problems elsewhere.

Seriously, the only reasonable thing I can imagine to do is to remove
the "/" from the default set to make it even more obvious that double
clicking on a URL is not broken, it is intended to do something entirely
different, something unrelated to URL recognition.

So, guys, there's nothing to see here. Please move on.

Use every feature for what it was designed for. Double click to select
the continuous region of characters out of a given configurable set.
Right click -> Copy Link Address to copy the URL.

This bug should be closed as invalid.

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Title:
  double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

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[Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[Jamie Strandboge]

FYI, this is still an issue on 16.04. The technique in comment #4
continues to work.

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Title:
  double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

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[Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[Christian Reis]

Dupe of bug 1463072.

** Tags added: regression-release

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Title:
  double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

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[Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[Wladimir J. van der Laan]

Not sure whether this is a bug, but I liked the previous behavior.

Though I didn't know that there was a "Copy Link Address" feature in the
right-click menu, will just get used to that, thanks Egmont.

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Title:
  double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

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[Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[Nicolas Devillers]

This bug is annoying since it make the whole process of copy/paste an
url to a specific browser heavier. Futhermore, by default URL without
specified scheme will be opened as file:/// on most browser.

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Title:
  double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

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[Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[Bug Watch Updater]

** Changed in: vte
   Status: Unknown => Confirmed

** Changed in: vte
   Importance: Unknown => Medium

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Title:
  double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

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[Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[LGB [Gábor Lénárt]]

Quite ugly "bug" :( I had the habit "since ages" (ehhh) to work in
terminal windows, and copy URLs etc. It worked nicely with a quick
double click on the URL which does not work anymore after upgrade to
Wily :( I understand that it was not meant to select URLs anyway (and
not a perfect solution either), but in practice it worked reasonably
well.  I've just wanted to write a bug report about this, however
launchpad was intelligent enough to find me a similar already existing
bug report, this one ;)

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Title:
  double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

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[Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[Egmont Koblinger]

Double click is not meant to select a URL (there's an option in the
right click menu for that), and adding colon to the list of word-chars
won't fix it either. E.g. if you have a URL with a trailing dot (which
strictly speaking could be a part of the URL, but usually denotes the
end of a sentence) then double click will select that, whereas
Ctrl+click or Right click -> copy URL won't consider that to be part of
the URL.

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Title:
  double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

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[Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[Jamie Strandboge]

FYI, here is the workaround that I am using:
$ dconf list /org/gnome/terminal/legacy/profiles:/
list
:b1dcc9dd-5262-4d8d-a863-c897e6d979b9/
:23d982d2-b22d-4b6d-8e60-ccebbc4e9afe/
:43f0a757-4fdc-4ea4-b5e4-28fa01733089/

I happen to know by looking at dconf-editor that
':b1dcc9dd-5262-4d8d-a863-c897e6d979b9/' is the one I care about, so:

$ dconf write
/org/gnome/terminal/legacy/profiles:/:b1dcc9dd-5262-4d8d-a863-c897e6d979b9
/word-char-exceptions '@ms 

[Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[Jamie Strandboge]

This is a quite annoying bug for gnome-terminal users. I strongly
suggest Ubuntu distro patches so that highlighting URLs works again. If
this can't be done in time, we should have a release note with
instructions on how users can fix it themselves.

** Also affects: vte via
   https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=730632
   Importance: Unknown
   Status: Unknown

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Title:
  double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

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[Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[Launchpad Bug Tracker]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

** Changed in: gnome-terminal (Ubuntu)
   Status: New => Confirmed

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  double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

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[Bug 1501250] Re: double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

[Egmont Koblinger]

The double click behavior doesn't care about URLs at all. It considers
certain characters as part of a word, certain others are not. There were
many debates specifically around whether ':' should be a word character
or not by default.

Unfortunately the setting is not available on the UI; see
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=730632#c33 for how to set
this hidden value.

** Bug watch added: GNOME Bug Tracker #730632
   https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=730632

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  double clicking on a URL drops the protocol from the URL

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