
GNOME Developers Hate the Mouse, Remove Middle-Click Paste - jbk
http://news.softpedia.com/news/GNOME-Developers-Hate-the-Mouse-Remove-Middle-Click-Paste-378370.shtml
======
JulianMorrison
Lets all just agree to ignore Gnome. They can go sit in their cell, and draw
unusable user interfaces on the walls in wax crayon, and mumble about how,
with all the features removed except one big bright button that you can't
click because it recognises neither mouse nor keyboard, Gnome is finally
complete.

~~~
VMG
Why are non-gnome users always so pissed about Gnome when there apparently are
so many excellent alternatives?

~~~
dredmorbius
Because I, for one, could give two shits about the GNOME desktop environment
as a whole, but find that there are occasionally useful applications written
for it.

Most recently, GNOME Terminal, ironically enough (it's about as non-GUI as you
can get for an application, but it's a reasonably nice terminal emulator, and
does a few things my trusty old rxvt doesn't: dynamic rescaling, dynamic color
themes).

Rhythmbox comes to mind. A few others.

I really don't care where the hell my apps come from, in terms of toolkit. But
if they break very-well-established Linux / Unix behaviors, it really pisses
me off.

I've also seen GNOME disease utterly fuck up perfectly good applications (the
Galeon Web browser comes to mind).

Worse, occasionally unaffiliated developers look at what GNOME is doing after
a few too many hits on the crack pipe themselves and think it's a good idea.

GNOME's utter user hostility and imperviousness to _any_ level of logic or
reason had already gotten old a decade ago.

~~~
zanny
/shrug, I love my konsole and clementine.

It can get old. Just use something else. I tried gnome3 when it happened and
jumped ship like a sinking Titanic. I'm now heavily invested in kde, and
version 5 isn't going to change direction into this minimalist nightmare, its
still all about choice, except under the hood it gets much faster and cleaner
with qt5/ gl accelerated qml.

~~~
michael_h
I have been trying to use KDE lately. I can configure it in every way
imaginable, which scratches an itch for sure, but: it takes _forever_ to start
up. After login, the gnome desktop will come up almost instantly, but KDE will
sit on the splash screen for a solid thirty seconds. Is there some 'go faster'
setting that everyone knows about but me?

~~~
zanny
Disable the splash screen, I always do. Its in system settings around
sessions, I think. You get to the desktop in a third the time but it might
need a few seconds to be fully responsive. Also, nepomuk starting up will
drastically slow down the boot time, so if you don't need the semantic search
features disable it.

~~~
sergiosgc
Really? It's 2013 and the login experience in Linux is that of windows 98?
Login, but don't do anything until the disk led stops blinking like mad.
Depressing...

Me, I've gone i3wm, but it's not for the faint of heart; And it still depends
on lots of gnome utilities, like the network manager or the settings daemon.

~~~
dredmorbius
_It 's 2013 and the login experience in Linux is that of windows 98? Login_

It really depends on your WM. Some of the heavier desktops, yes. With the
lighter ones (again, I use WindowMaker), I'm up and running in a couple of
seconds (there are some apps and utilities which take a few seconds to
launch).

The mouseless / tiling WMs (such as i3wm) are pretty cool as well.

------
fhd2
Looking at the commit in question, they're not only removing it, they're
planning to have a new function for middle clicking:

> The middle-click will be used to start selections, and provide text
> contextual menus (such as word definitions, sharing, etc.)

This seems wrong. They're removing a slightly obscure feature to replace it
with a completely obscure one. I wouldn't call myself an UX expert, but this
seems to violate at least two important principles:

1\. Affordance/User expectations: How is anybody going to figure this out, if
not by accident? Worse, users who knew the middle click will probably be
irritated by this.

2\. Consistency: Are only Gnome applications going to support this? It very
much seems like that. So their new function for middle clicking won't even
work consistently across applications.

I know I'm being an armchair critic here, but I honestly wonder why they think
it's a good idea.

~~~
brokenparser
2 doesn't really matter because other desktops might not want this at all. If
they do, someone should make an effort to create a freedesktop.org standard
codifying the (shared) behaviour in an agnostic manner. Can happen, but if you
want to run a KDE program in Gnome you're bound to see inconsistencies all
over the place. Both of them think their way is best.

------
chris_wot
Imagine, if you will, that Gnome developers had control over keyboards. The
first key to be removed would be sysreq, then scroll-lock, and break. And it
was dubbed Keyboard 2.0

In Keyboard 2.1, the caps lock key was removed as you can use the shift key.
The Windows key was surplus to requirements, there's a perfectly good alt key.

Fast forward to Keyboard 3.0. There is no longer a control key (hold down alt
for 2 seconds!), numlock is gone (the top row has numbers), cursor keys gone
(you can use a mouse to move around).

In Keyboard 3.1 they removed the shift key as stylistically capitals aren't
necessary.

in keyboard 3.2 they removed the comma and semicolon. these really aren't
necessary as you don't need to pause when reading.

in keyboard 3.3 there is no need for single quotes because you should not use
contractions. that just causes confusion and besides the amount of debates and
derision around it were getting ridiculous. justification: world peace and an
end to grammar nazis.

in keyboard 35 they are seriously considering removing the enter key the
exclamation mark and any characters that require umlauts also they have
removed the full stop because ideas dont exist in a vacuum so why should
sentences as these are constructs of a narrow mind not to mention this will
help with a cleaner text rendering codebase

~~~
lcedp
It's funny that in your comment meaning to be as ridiculous as possible there
are a few very sane ideas i.e. getting rid of caps lock and num lock keys
which nobody uses and everybody is pissed of when they pressed accidentally.

~~~
chris_wot
I find it funny that you think that "nobody" uses the caps lock key!

------
hbbio
Oh, no! This is one of the most useful Linux/X features. People want the
feature on OSX, even with quirks.

[http://superuser.com/questions/87470/copy-on-select-paste-
on...](http://superuser.com/questions/87470/copy-on-select-paste-on-middle-
click-on-mac-os-x)

~~~
rsynnott
Yeah; this is about the only thing I think X11 does better than MacOS.

~~~
davidw
MacOS apparently does not do focus follows mouse. The thought makes me
shudder!

~~~
zenojevski
Can you elaborate on this?

When I tried it, this feature made me feel very unsafe, in that a small,
"unrelated" movement of the mouse could lead to huge modifications to my
current desktop workspace (and snap me out of concentration at the very
least).

Seems a feature that leads to surprise, a bit like if "i" worked as a toggle
both in command mode and insert mode in vim.

I'll note that I'm not bashing the feature, nor a personal preference. I'd
like to know what advantages are there, from a knowledgeable user.

~~~
davidw
> When I tried it, this feature made me feel very unsafe

I use it to switch between windows without having to fiddle with something
like alt-shift, or clicking on the target window each time I want to move.
It's about speed, not safety. Once you get used to it though, I don't think
you end up in the wrong window very often.

------
quchen
Before this thread starts to become a rant about Gnome developers again, I'd
like to mention that I find middle-mouse pasting annoying and I would
_appreciate an option_ to disable it in X. What the Gnome devs did was just
inverting the setting without providing an option for it, which is a pretty
awful idea.

~~~
probably_wrong
I'm interested in why you'd like to see an option to _disable_ it, considering
that you could just as well not click the button. Is there something in your
daily workflow that leads to lots of accidental presses?

~~~
smackay
My mouse has a scroll wheel which also doubles as the middle button when
clicked. When scrolling through text, a little too much pressure and you end
up pasting code all over the place. It's a monumental pain in the ass when
dealing with code and requires minute checking all of changes in case an
errant paste makes into the repository.

~~~
tterrace
I've accidentally pasted lines with --username --password into source files
because of a sensitive scroll wheel... That's pretty embarrassing in code
review.

~~~
PommeDeTerre
Wouldn't your own personal pre-peer-review review have caught that?

~~~
ars
Plus you should be checking diffs before committing anything.

------
pdkl95
I have tried many times over the last decade or so to retire my current window
manager of choice (Enlightenment DR16). The software hasn't been maintained
significantly for most of that time, and several incompatibilities and
problematic behavior with modern[1] software.

I initially assumed this was only familiarity with my current environment and
dependence on the various settings, tweaks, and shortcuts that build up over
the years. Jumping into any other WM was obviously going to take some time to
get used to, and finding out how to re-enable stuff like my preferred keys for
switching virtual-desktop should only take a weekend to figure out and port
over.

All of the replacements ended up being reverted back to my working E16,
usually because of either: creeping featurism/bloat slowing down or
interfering with overall responsiveness, or this recent distressing trend to
remove well-established features and behaviors.

What's particularly distressing is that these problems seem to be getting
_worse_ with time. I gave up attempting to find a sane configuration for GNOME
years ago due to their overall bloat and confusing and rarely-consistent
style. Misfeatures like this mouse button change suggests they are now
embracing the Microsoft-style "Principle of Maximal Surprise" style of
software design.

If you told me a decade ago that I'd be using the WM traditionally described
as "unnecessary eye-candy" because it is _faster_ than the other options, I
wouldn't have believed you. If crap like changing the mouse buttons becomes
wide-spread, though, I guess I'll be stuck using E16 for _another_ decade.

At least I have a (mostly) working WM to fallback on, I suppose. The feature-
removal drama in Firefox is quickly becoming far more problematic...

[1]: "modern" being defined as "some time after Rasterman started teasing us
with very-early E17 prototypes"

~~~
dredmorbius
You've just described my situation, though my window manager is WindowMaker,
not E. The lack of development is a feature. It works, its fast and stable,
and there are very, very few surprises. I've tweaked it modestly with some
appearance, behavior, and keybinding settings, otherwise its a very low-fuss
configuration.

And I've been using it for 16 years. That's a lot of familiarity.

------
mgkimsal
Have there been many examples of GNOME devs removing or substantially changing
a feature, then reversing the decision based on community outcry?

This seemed to be a trend 10 years ago or so - I haven't used GNOME on a daily
basis since then - and it seemed the GNOME team has almost always had a "this
is how it will be, no arguments" attitude. It's probably a perception more
than anything else, but perception is reality, don't they say? Trying to make
radical changes then hiding behind "Human Interface Guidelines" \- even when
the new behaviour is demonstrably bad - seemed to be their MO all those years
ago, but my memory may be a bit hazy now.

So... we'll have a thread here of people saying "no, don't do it!" or "give me
an option to toggle!" but I suspect the damage is done and this is how it will
be. What decisions have been overturned by community feedback?

~~~
bjourne
Yes, sort of. Epiphany developers for a long time resisted adding tabs to the
browser and instead insisted that handling multiple viewports was the job of
the window manager. In theory, they were right, in practice it just doesn't
work.

Then somewhere around GNOME 2.12 or so, Nautilus fell in love with the
"spatial" concept. So each directory opened would open its own window and also
remember the window position so it would be opened in the exact same location
the next time. Leads to the user having 30+ windows open if you want to drill
down to some files a few directories deep.

No way to undo the suckyness except to edit some gconf registry key.

The User Interface Designers thought it was great. Everyone else thought it
was a disaster. Fortunately it was changed to something more sensible a few
releases after and the spatial desktop horse is (for now) dead and buried.

Btw, while I sound really critical of GNOME, I'm not. I think it's great that
they try new and wacky ideas that no one likes. Sometimes they strike gold and
then progress is made benefitting all of us.

~~~
mgkimsal
IMO, it's the perception of attitude when introducing new and wacky ideas.
People seeing these new ideas say "that's wacky/bad/misguided/wrong/etc" and
the defense (used to, anyway) fell back to "our HIG says this is the best way"
(paraphrasing). To then recant years later and reverse things just makes it
harder to accept any new ideas that come out as received wisdom.

If they had a 'wacky new ideas' branch for people to test on, I suspect the
whole thing would be received a lot better.

------
the_mitsuhiko
I'm more than okay with that. Middle click paste is one of the weirdest user
experience elements and it does not even safe much time and is very easy to
miss execute.

~~~
VMG
Don't forget that it is one of two buffers, called PRIMARY for whatever reason
(there is no secondary). If you select and press Ctrl-C, the content goes to
CLIPBOARD. I can't count the number of times I've yelled expletives when I
pasted the wrong buffer by mistake.

There should only be one clipboard.

~~~
dredmorbius
I have xclip installed (it copies/pastes from the X11 clipboard as a
commandline utility), and having long had 'xc' and 'xp' shell scripts, finally
added 'xpc' to paste from the 'CLIPBOARD' buffer after getting frustrated once
too often that I wasn't able to do so.

I'll use these to "read in" files:

    
    
        xc < filename
    

And then in vim (faster than toggling paste mode):

    
    
        r ! xp
    

or

    
    
        r ! xpc  # for CLIPBOARD buffer

~~~
marmaduke
hm, why not just

    
    
        "+P
    
    ?

~~~
dredmorbius
That doesn't seem to paste from the X11 primary clipboard buffer.

It's also a double pinky keystroke with a shift required (on QWERTY). Really
awkward to type.

Try ':0r ! xp'

It does pretty much roll off your fingers.

------
samuellevy
Every time I end up using windows, I end up frustratedly middle-clicking,
expecting text to come out.

I have been using MATE to remain productive (gnome 3 and Unity really don't
fit my workflow), so this won't really affect me, but it puts another nail in
the coffin of the idea that I might transition to gnome 3 in the future.

------
perlgeek
Please don't.

It's ennoying enough in the "normal" case when pasting doesn't work with the
middle-click, but in the past I've had several cases with X-forwarded windows
where Ctrl+Insert used the paste buffer of the remote machine, and middle
click used the paste buffer of the local machine. Removing the middle-click
paste means I have no convenient way to copy&paste into "remote" applications
anymore.

------
davidw
I've been using this feature for, let's see... about 16 years, and it's not
just an ingrained habit, it's actually quite useful. Sooner or later it looks
like I'm going to have to sit down and fiddle with the alternatives to Gnome.

It's kind of puerile, but for whatever reason this gave me a good laugh:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6282043](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6282043)

~~~
adestefan
I thought same until I used other systems (mainly OS X and some Windows 7) for
around 2 years. I've been using Linux full time again about the past 2 months
and now realize it's more of a pain in the ass than it's usually worth.

------
derefr
> According to a commit on this matter, it will [instead] be used to "start
> selections ...

You mean, like Plan9's UI, where buttons and menus are "just" text? _That 'd_
be something I'd love to see come to another desktop environment...

------
yalogin
There are many over reactions in this thread and none of them mentioned they
actually use the paste feature. What is the big deal? I like it. I don't know
any one that uses the middle button for pasting. In fact the middle is more
likely to be a scroll wheel and so clicking on that never happens. Overloading
that something is okay with me.

~~~
dbaupp
I use it _all_ the time, even with a scroll-wheel; far more than I use
ctrl-C/V.

~~~
buster
Everyone suggesting to use ctrl-c/v is not often using a terminal i guess ;)

So now in the future i have to select test in a terminal with the mouse, right
click, click copy and then hit ctrl-v or right click again, whereas now i just
select text and hit the middle mouse?!

Please, leave the middle-mouse-paste an option or atleast make it a gnome-
extension :(

~~~
jkbyc
you can use Ctrl+C outside the terminal and then Ctrl+Shift+V to paste into it
(similarly Ctrl+Shift+C for copying from terminal)

btw, I also use clicking the scroll-wheel to paste all the time

~~~
buster
I didn't even know ctrl+shift works BUT also i like to keep my fingers in tact
( = pressing ctrl+shift+c feels like a complicated yoga-practice)

------
3amOpsGuy
Middle paste has never been a reliable feature, (are you pasting from X
clipboard or GNOME clipboard? - it changes depending on context). For that
reason alone, i can see a case can be made for this change.

At first glance it seems like a backward move to me, but i'd be at least
willing to give the idea a try.

GNOME 3 takes a lot of heat, they're one of the few actually pushing the
envelope so it's to be expected i suppose.

A little more encouragement and a little less boring complaints "stating the
obvious" would go a long way.

------
thomasahle
I've hated this feature for 10 years. Clicking ny scrollwheel us supposed to
do something scroll related, like it does in certain programs, but this stupid
paste thing makes inconsistent. Sometimes I've even seen the middle button
paste into the address bar and send me off, loosing whatever unsaved work I
had on a website. If I want to paste I'll use the keyboard, Ctrl+Shift+V is
perfectly fine. Why don't all you non gnome using gnome haters go somewhere
else to complain?

~~~
draven
The wheel came after the button (ie there were 3 button mouses first and the
middle button morphed into a button/scroll wheel hybrid later, there was
nothing strictly scrolling related to the middle button before.)

------
lutoma
Well there go the last Gnome users… Since Ubuntu abandoned it, Gnome seems to
be getting less and less usage (I can't blame anyone for it, seeing as how
it's become completely unusable…).

------
_pmf_
I hope this is from an Onion article, otherwise I fear for the safety of GNOME
developers world wide.

------
erikb
Well, although I also think that established default behaviour should only be
changed with great care and the option to turn it back easily, I wouldn't form
an opinion about such a huge change just based on one article. It doesn't give
much context. Reading in the Issue and the commit it's also possible that the
Gnome community is against this change as well and it was a decision by a
Bastien Nocera withouth the community's consent. This might mean it gets
reverted before the user sees it or shortly after. So there is not much to get
upset about right now.

------
JeremyNT
I find the GNOME project fascinating to watch.

Many users, myself included, have railed at the removal of things we have
grown accustomed to. Some time ago, however, I decided to just give up and go
along for the ride. Why not? These people surely have more UX experience than
I do. Perhaps I don't really know best in this regard, even though I know what
has worked for me in the past. Perhaps there are better ways.

In fact, I find GNOME 3 is actually quite usable if one can manage to remove
one's expectations based on prior versions. After the initial pain of "giving
up" features I had become used to over the years, I found myself enjoying its
simplicity.

GNOME is a singular case study in its dogged determination to rapidly cull
beloved features; indeed, I can't think of any other UI project of this size
that has been so aggressive and so blind to user input. There are few things
the GNOME team seems to hold sacred, and likewise they seem more than willing
to alienate existing users and violate user expectations in the name of
progress. I find this kind of blind determination and adherence to design
goals at the cost of popularity admirable in its own way, although it seems
that the project is doomed to find only a small niche due to this approach
(which, honestly, is kind of a shame, since I find it quite pleasant to work
with).

Like everybody else who has integrated middle click paste into their
workflows, I'm going to feel the pain from the removal of this feature. But
I'm pretty sure I'll still be able to get my work done without it, and
eventually I'll forget about it completely, and I'll be OK with whatever
replaces it.

------
moron4hire
I hated this feature of Gnome, but I will probably hate what they're replacing
it with even more. I use the middle click to open links in new tabs and to
close said tabs, and every other window manager I've used does it that way.
What's next? Draw a small circle around the things you want to select with the
cursor instead of left clicking on them?

------
chris_wot
From the bug report:

(In reply to comment #2)

> Breaking a default that has been in X forever is not desirable. In this
> case,

> it is a good default. Leave it alone. Bastien, please do not do this.

Disabling broken behaviour by default is a good thing. It would be a GTK+
specific XSetting, which would only be disabled by default based on your
XSettings manager. If you use gnome-settings-daemon, then it would be disabled
by default.

The people that paste their passwords to IRC will thank us.

\---

And there you have their use case. People who use IRC. Instead of giving an
option of disabling middle clicking in the IRC application (or per-
application) they will, instead, be removing this commonly used feature,
because "won't _someone_ think of the users?"

~~~
rbanffy
[https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665193](https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665193),
in case anyone is wondering.

------
andreer
I'll miss this feature, but I realize that for the "average user" which only
uses ctrl-x/c/v it is probably a good thing.

Personally, I've long been planning to switch back to a tiling wm anyway.

~~~
antocv
Who is this average user you are talking about?

Its a myth, a fantasy, an excuse for all things gnome and other "lets make a
product for idiots" does to butcher itself into oblivion, many startups do the
same mistake.

The idea "for the average user" or "for your grandmother" is a mind-trap that
leads to poor choices and poor products. Dont make products for someone not
interested in using it, make them for someone like a child instead of an old
person like a grandmother. Just give a kid a smartphone or KDE and look how
they learn and use the devices (Ive seen it with my own eyes, a kid use KDE to
start his games, save pictures form the internet, view them in dolphin etc,
and he was just 4-5 years at the time.), and give a smartphone or KDE to a
grandmother and see basically nothing happen.

------
beijingcocktail
Mddle click paste is one of the things that made me install Linux on my
MacBook whrn I geniunlybtried to switch to OS X.

For me at least, this feature significantly improves the UX. I use many times
every day.

------
Fice
They are not simply removing middle-click paste function, but replacing it
with something presumably more useful.

What I learned from my own experience with GNOME 3 (I really like it) and from
observing other people's reactions, is that we tend to overestimate the
importance of our old habits and are willing to put more effort to protect
them than it would take to change them (e.g. spending all day figuring out how
to customize the UI while it would take an hour to get used to the defaults).

~~~
claudius
It takes about 30 minutes top to install Xfce…

~~~
Fice
And then spend the rest of the day configuring it to match the habits acquired
with whatever desktop environment that was used before installing Xfce.

------
iv_08
If they "hate the mouse" why do they actually add _more_ functionality to the
middle mouse button? The article headline makes no sense.

------
aday
This issue has got blown out of proportion, and the facts have been totally
lost.

Nothing has been changed. Those of us in the GNOME project were working
towards a slightly different solution, which would allow middle-click paste
like functionality. That solution didn't work out for the next release (3.10),
so we reinstated the old behaviour.

Everyone needs to calm down. We're not going to simply remove middle-click
paste.

------
inthewind
See also:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6281881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6281881)

------
inthewind
They'd probably be better off trying to jettison the keyboard to simplify the
computer interface.

~~~
VLM
... and the mouse, and the display... just SSH in.

This closely resembles the herd of servers at my disposal. I find it a highly
productive desktop environment / user interface.

------
travelorg
No!

------
mseepgood
What a stupid article.

