

Gnome Developers Re-Implement Middle-Click Paste - hanuca
http://news.softpedia.com/news/GNOME-Developers-Re-Implement-Middle-Click-Paste-380352.shtml

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thristian
A friend of mine complained on Google+ and attracted the attention of a GNOME
developer who said that (a) it would be put back, and (b) one of the reasons
it was scheduled for removal was that the Wayland graphics server doesn't have
the notion of separate "selection" and "clipboard" shared-data.

I imagine there's a lot of resistance at the idea of including decades-old X11
quirks into the fresh, modern UI era, and I can totally understand that. The
best argument I've heard for supporting something like it is to consider it an
interruptible drag-and-drop operation. That is to say, in every scenario where
you can select something then drag and drop it into another place, or another
application, you should be able to select that thing then middle-click on the
destination for exactly the same effect. The best argument for having this
behaviour (at least as an option) is that it's more accessible than
traditional drag-and-drop for users with certain mobility impairments, and
fully-able users can use it to do things they can't normally do with drag-and-
drop, like shuffle through windows to find the intended target. It also
piggybacks on a lot of infrastructure (format negotiation, etc.) that needs to
exist for drag-and-drop anyway, and lastly it makes old-school users happy. :)

~~~
simias
I don't consider middle-click paste a quirk but rather a very useful feature I
find myself missing all the time when I'm on Windows.

The bug in my humble opinion is having separate "selection" and "clipboard"
buffers, but I just use a small util in the background to always keep both
synchronized.

By the way, do people really use drag-n-drop on a daily basis? The few times I
need to use that (mostly on windows) it's a really painful and awkward
operation. You have to select what you want, click, then find the target
(possibly minimized or hidden or something) and then drop at the right
position while maintaining the mouse button pressed all the while. That's
pretty terrible user experience as far as I'm concerned, but maybe I'm just
doing it wrong/not used to it.

~~~
bgruber
> The bug in my humble opinion is having separate "selection" and "clipboard"
> buffers, but I just use a small util in the background to always keep both
> synchronized.

i actually appreciate this, because somteimes I really do want to copy
something, do some other things, and then paste. Can't have the selection
buffer overwriting the clipboard buffer.

> By the way, do people really use drag-n-drop on a daily basis? ... while
> maintaining the mouse button pressed all the while.

Agreed, especially in the age of the trackpad, on which drag and drop is far
more difficult.

~~~
samatman
Your mileage may vary. I've never been a drag and drop sort of fellow, but I
did start using three-finger swiping to move tabs around in my browser when
that feature was introduced.

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tekacs
There's something delightfully quaint about a world in which middle-click
paste warrants a news article. :)

Caveats: \- I'm amongst the folks rejoicing. :) \- Yes, Apple products and
Win8 sometimes attract similar attention to detail. \- I recognise the
technical context, too (see thristian's comment).

Still quaint. :P

------
bgruber
middle-click paste is so plainly useful that I often find myself completely
baffled that other windowing environments haven't copied it.

~~~
antocv
Especially having two buffers is a productivity booster, if I would count how
many times per day I take some data from a source window/view with ctrl+C and
another one with selecting it, then pasting one of them with ctrtl+v and the
other one at the correct position with middleclick it would be quite alot.
Like I just did with this text. Then I have klipboard which keeps both of the
buffers in a history, so awesome Im baffled how my collegues at windows can
even do their job.

Especially useful in terminals where ctrl+shift+c/v is awkward to press
compared to a middleclick.

------
stuaxo
"The controversial desktop environment" .. things were not always thus. (gnome
user since 0.9).

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hanuca
Hoooooray! Victory, at least for now...

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username42
Good work, Long life to Ubuntu-Gnome, my favorite desktop since Ubuntu
introduced Unity.

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lockyc
Thank goodness! Middle click paste drives me crazy. ... Although i dont use
gnome

