Re: X-Windows Copy & Paste

On 8/19/2003 1:46 AM, Marko Macek wrote:
> Jason Gurtz wrote:
>> On 8/18/2003 12:46 AM, Reilly Burke wrote:
>> 
>>>This is another REALLY BIG Linux annoyance.  I'm a desktop kind of guy, 
>>>and I like to cut/copy and paste all day long.  But Linux has really 
>>>really bad cut/copy and paste [...]
>> 
>> 
>> Actualy, Linux and other UNIXen have pretty good cut/copy and paste
>> *provided* you have a 3 button mouse.  Both in X and using GPM in the
>> console, simply selecting text with the first button copies that into
>> the buffer and third button pastes.
> 
> This is not cut/copy/paste. It works differently from Ctrl+XVC and is 
> completely separate from it. It really annoys me when people advertize 
> this as cut&paste.

Well, I suppose if your definitions are based around the microsoft way
of doing cut/copy/paste then no, it's not.  The X way is still more
efficient (less keystrokes), though yes, it does require learning to do
things in different ways.

I think really the annoyance here is not that Linux and X in particular
are lacking of functionality to arbitrarily move around text, it's that
it's different.  I'm wondering if you could play with key bindings to
achieve the behaviour you want?

> Technical explanation here:
> 
> http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/clipboards-spec/clipboards.txt

Sure, like most things *NIX, there is more than one way to do it, and
no, it's not the same everywhere.  Again, the annoyance can really be
extended and generalized to cover many different things.  Just like Red
Hat is not the same as Debian which is not the same as FreeBSD etc..

> It would be really good if there was a standard way to disable this 
> behavior globally for all applications.
> 
> There are some important applications that confuse this, like xterm
> (still the best terminal emulator). It uses Shift+Ins to paste primary 
> selection and doesn't support the clipboard at all.
> 
> Opinions?

Well, here's a prime example of the tradeoff of power involved in Linux.
 You prefer a simpler and smaller sized terminal (I suppose you like TWM
also?).  Other people like full featured and "pretty" terminals like
Eterm or Aterm or whatever, wereas you would probably be annoyed to have
to use such bloated and horrific things.  Some people may even like
Konsole (eek!).  Confusingly, all these things probably do things, at
least by default, in different and conflicting ways.  Probably, they
could all be customized to behave in the same, or close to the same way.

Once again, we can extend this to choice of window/desktop manager, chat
client, file manager, etc...

Compare this to the simplistic child that is MS Windows.  There is only
one "terminal" (well OK you could buy 4DOS/4NT), and it sucks.  But, you
always know what you're going to get, so one can't be annoyed to have to
learn somthing new.  Heh, even there it is not consistent.  Ctrl+C and
friends don't work in cmd.exe.  In Windows 2000, by default, you can
simply click and drag to select a portion of the console window.  In
Windows NT and XP, you must first use the alt+space menu, navigate to
the edit sub-menu, and choose mark, then use arrows or mouse to select.
 *Very* confusingly, you must then hit Enter (WTF were they thinking!?)
to copy the selected area to the clipboard.  Don't even think about
pasting anything in the console, there's not even a keyboard accelerator
or mouse gesture (that I know of) to do it, you can only dig into the
alt+space menu to do it, bah.

Cheers,

~Jason

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