GNOME Developers Hate the Mouse, Remove Middle-Click Paste

http://news.softpedia.com/news/GNOME-Developers-Hate-the-Mouse-Remove-Middle-Click-Paste-378370.shtml

by jbk • 13 years ago

65 125 13 years ago

news.softpedia.com

travelorg• 13 years ago

No!

hbbio2• 13 years ago

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...

rsynnott• 13 years ago

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

davidw3• 13 years ago

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

deong• 13 years ago

I use PopClip (http://pilotmoon.com/popclip/) on my Macs. It's not quite as seamless as having everything you select automatically available for middle-click pasting, but it's pretty close.

perlgeek• 13 years ago

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.

quchen• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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?

latk• 13 years ago

For me: a touchpad as the primary pointer input device. I use two fingers for scrolling and a two-finger tap as middle mouse button clicks. I really like that setup for web browsing, but it frequently messes up code in the editor.

smackay• 13 years ago

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.

ANTSANTS2• 13 years ago

In most web browsers, middle click closes tabs, opens links in new tabs, and on Windows, starts an automatic "scroll follows mouse" mode. I seem to remember that at one point, Chromium on Linux would interpret middle clicking on an unclickable part of the page to mean "interpret the text stored in the clipboard as a URL or search term, and go to it." Imagine the fun I had with the occasional misclick of a link before I found an extension that implements Windows-like middle click scroll.

The only time I ever intentionally use middle click paste is when using the terminal where, you know, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V are already taken. An option to disable middle click paste for everything but terminal emulators could only be a benefit, removing a rare but ever present source of confusion and mistakes.

werid• 13 years ago

What the Gnome devs did was just inverting the setting without providing an option for it, which is a pretty awful idea.

Gnome devs don't like to give the user options.

buster3• 13 years ago

Agreed in that this needs to be an option. I'm using the middle mouse paste very often, it's such a nice and easy thing to have.. Do i want a "text context" menu? No. I'd enable the mouse-click paste again..

betterunix• 13 years ago

I was going to respond to a link detailing how to disable it, but was shocked to find no answers after a few minutes of Googling. I like the feature but absolutely agree with you: there should at least be a way to disable it in xorg.conf.

mgkimsal2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

mgkimsal2• 13 years ago

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.

SEMW• 13 years ago

What decisions have been overturned by community feedback?

A few, AFAICS.

E.g. Gnome 3.10 is returning to a conventional multi-option power dialogue box[1], after the merging of 'suspend' & 'power off' into one menu item was roundly rejected by everyone (the extension giving them back as separate options is the 3rd most downloaded of all time on extensions.gnome.org).

Most obviously, Gnome 3.8's 'classic mode' (which is just a collection of extensions which replicate gnome 2 interaction models) wouldn't exist without community feedback (possibly combined with pressure from RH with an eye on conservative RHEL customers).

[1] https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/maste... (feature page: https://wiki.gnome.org/ThreePointNine/Features/SystemStatusM... )

andreer• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

inthewind3• 13 years ago

You really think that average users use the keyboard shortcuts? I'd wager they use the menus or icons. Chorded keyboard shortcuts are not that easy, especially for novices.

I wonder how you copy and paste with a touch device? And how easy it is.

samuellevy• 13 years ago

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.

JulianMorrison2• 13 years ago

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.

VMG2• 13 years ago

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

JulianMorrison2• 13 years ago

Because we used to like it.

PommeDeTerre2• 13 years ago

We may not use GNOME today, but many of us did happily use it before the GNOME 3 disaster. After that happened, though, we had no choice but to move to other environments.

Some of us even hoped that maybe someday the situation would reverse itself, and GNOME could once again become a viable desktop environment. Unfortunately, it has become clear over time that this is not the case, and likely never will be.

It's disappointing to see a project that was once quite useful, yet still with a lot of potential, be destroyed so quickly and unnecessarily. And it's perfectly acceptable and understandable for us to voice our displeasure with further degradation of what GNOME once stood for.

dredmorbius7• 13 years ago

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.

keithpeter• 13 years ago

Actually, I rather like Gnome as evident in the version that came with Gnome Ubuntu 13.04, but that is besides the point.

RHEL 7 will ship with a Gnome desktop on desktop clients, and whatever Red Hat release will be cloned into CentOS, Scientific Linux and Springfield Linux. That, I gather, in total, is rather a large number of screens. The users of those screens in various organisations will not be able to install a different DE as they (may) not have admin rights and (may) not have access to repositories with alternative DEs available. Red Hat have already suggested that they will be releasing the RHEL 7 desktop with gnome classic as the default to minimise training costs.

If anyone here knows of a RHEL type managed system with a large number of screens, it would be interesting to see how RHEL 7 is accepted over the next few years (of course, they may decide not to upgrade until RHEL6 is EoL).

gnoway• 13 years ago

Because it leeches potential talent away from other projects?

I don't really have a big ax to grind with Gnome, but I don't understand why it remained relevant after the KDE/Qt licensing issue was resolved.

chris_wot8• 13 years ago

A lot of us are Gnome users.

_pmf_• 13 years ago

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

lutoma• 13 years ago

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…).

the_mitsuhiko• 13 years ago

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.

oakwhiz• 13 years ago

It's really useful when you have to paste many things repeatedly in a way that has some spatial ordering. But most of the time I dislike middle-click paste (and highlight-to-copy) because I will occasionally copy and paste things accidentally. Some kind of keyboard shortcut to toggle this behavior might be quite handy.

m_mueller• 13 years ago

I recommend using something like Sublimes Multicursor instead.

1) Ctrl-alt-L: Give me a cursor at the end of all selected lines.

2) Select the line paces you want to paste using normal editor keyboard commands.

3) Ctrl-C

4) Go to the place in your lines where you want to paste (or click somewhere to get a new cursor and paste everything newline separated)

5) Ctrl-V

Scales to however many lines you want to do this to, with 'constant programmer time' ;-).

NoodleIncident• 13 years ago

Its a beautiful command when all you have is a touchpad. Click both right and left to paste the last selected text.

dredmorbius7• 13 years ago

Which is why I prefer Lenovo touchpads: three buttons.

Actually, mine has five:

Three at the top (corresponding to the mouse buttons), generally used with the trackpoint.

Another two at the bottom (two-button mouse), used with the trackpad (which I've, of course, disabled in BIOS like any sane user would).

VMG2• 13 years ago

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.

Buttons840• 13 years ago

You just taught me some weird new things about my computer. It tried what you said and, indeed, you are correct.

dagw• 13 years ago

Funny, I really like having two clipboards and use the feature often.

zero_intp• 13 years ago

There is only one clipboard. plus an additional text buffer.

As a multi system user with only one k/m input (windows/red hat), I love the differentiated buffer capability. It allows discrete usage of cntl x/c/v across systems and STILL allows me to manipulate c/p actions while multitasking.

dredmorbius7• 13 years ago

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

    r ! xpc  # for CLIPBOARD buffer

thingie• 13 years ago

It is not a buffer as such. Once the application holding the primary selection quits, you can't get the selected text, it doesn't exist anymore in any way. It doesn't get stored. In fact, you're just telling your application which content should it provide, when asked for the selection (not that it couldn't provide anything it likes).

Clipboard selection gets copied to a clipboard application and is accessible as long as you don't overwrite it (or even then, if you have more sophisticated clipboard app).

RivieraKid• 13 years ago

For me it's one of Linux's killer features. When I program I use it a lot. It's much more comfortable than selecting with the mouse, pressing Ctrl+C, clicking on the destination and pressing Ctrl+V.

fhd2• 13 years ago

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.

brokenparser3• 13 years ago

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.

matt__rose• 13 years ago

There's nothing obscure about middle-click paste. It's been a standard on every UNIX workstation going back to SunOS and IRIX

derefr• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

buster3• 13 years ago

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 :(

potyl• 13 years ago

The nice thing with X is that you can use both! CRTL-C/V and the middle mouse button use different clipboards. I use both at the same time, it' quite handy when you need to copy/paste from different sources in the same app.

pbhjpbhj• 13 years ago

In fact the middle is more likely to be a scroll wheel and so clicking on that never happens. //

Almost every tab I close is by clicking on my scroll wheel.

Some inferior scroll wheels it seems don't click but I've bought quite cheap mouses and they all seem to have scroll-click.

thejosh• 13 years ago

removing a feature for the sake of removing a feature, if you don't use it doesn't mean noone else uses it.

patmcguire• 13 years ago

Using the middle button for pasting what's highlighted is one of the few things on X11 that's consistent across configurations and over the past 25-ish years.

sentenza• 13 years ago

It's one of those things that you fall in love with after having heard about it way too late.

At my last workplace (linux only environment), one day, somebody showed it to a second person while a bunch of other people were in the room. Two days later, everybody was using it as if they couldn't live without it. Turns out that before nobody knew the feature existed.

a3n• 13 years ago

Geez, I use it all the time. I use it so much it's like breathing, I don't even think about it. In fact it's such a part of my way of working that I didn't realize that's what the article was talking about.

Double left-click and it's immediately in the buffer, because why else would you double click text? Middle click and you're done. Easy peasy, and I would hoist the black flag and start slitting throats if it disappeared.

Fortunately for me I use LXDE, where they seem to have resisted making a career out of churn. I really don't care what's in front of me except for what I'm working on, and I don't want to be aware of my DE. To me it's like adding features to a coffee cup. Once you're drinking coffee why would you care at all, as long as the handle still worked.

chris_wot8• 13 years ago

That's the problem. The gnome guys would have removed the handle.

chris_wot8• 13 years ago

I use it all the time. Literally.

ars2• 13 years ago

don't know any one that uses the middle button for pasting.

Well now you know several people who do. I use it all the time, and hate using windows which doesn't have the feature.

You can't use keyboard shortcuts in terminals, so that's not a replacement of middle click.

Start using it - you'll quickly find it indispensable.

rbanffy2• 13 years ago

none of them mentioned they actually use the paste feature

Everyone with a terminal uses the feature. I've been using it every day for the past 17 years.

It's somewhat inconsistent and unreliable between applications, but it's a huge timesaver.

mseepgood• 13 years ago

What a stupid article.

davidw3• 13 years ago

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

adestefan• 13 years ago

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.

mattdeboard• 13 years ago

I switched to xmonad and have been kicking myself for waiting so long to switch.

iv_08• 13 years ago

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

erikb• 13 years ago

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.

thomasahle• 13 years ago

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?

chris_wot8• 13 years ago

Why would your scroll wheel be a button? Sounds like hardware UX fail.

draven• 13 years ago

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.)

Fice2• 13 years ago

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).

claudius4• 13 years ago

It takes about 30 minutes top to install Xfce…

Fice2• 13 years ago

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.

beijingcocktail• 13 years ago

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.

3amOpsGuy• 13 years ago

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.

pdkl95• 13 years ago

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"

dredmorbius7• 13 years ago

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.

sergiosgc3• 13 years ago

Congratulations on managing to still have E16 running. I used it, then windowmaker, then gnome. When I tried to go back from gnome to E, all sorts of little things broke. I finally settled on i3. It is first strange, then estranged, then really great (it disappears, as any good desktop environment should).

chris_wot8• 13 years ago

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

lcedp2• 13 years ago

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_wot8• 13 years ago

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

solnyshok• 13 years ago

I USE CAPSLOCK ALL THE TIME!!! :)

chris_wot8• 13 years ago

I shall now write a blog post with dozens of links as to why my "no capitals" stance is the one and true way and you are wrong and unenlightened.

moron4hire• 13 years ago

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?

inthewind3• 13 years ago

chris_wot8• 13 years ago

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?"

rbanffy2• 13 years ago

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665193, in case anyone is wondering.

inthewind3• 13 years ago

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

VLM• 13 years ago

... 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.

JeremyNT• 13 years ago

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.

aday• 13 years ago

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.

GNOME Developers Hate the Mouse, Remove Middle-Click Paste

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