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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

No one types out URLs

An unfounded assumption. I type out URLs quite often on things like blog comments or when creating accounts on new webapps. I'm not sure why I'd go to my own Web site or Twitter page and copy/paste the URL when I can type it a lot quicker.

Further, you don't have to "delete" the existing "http:// when pasting. Just double click in the field to have all the text selected, then paste. It replaces the existing contents. Adds the time it takes to do a double click or press Ctrl/Cmd+A.

The problem with UI suggestions is that even when they're logical and seem to make sense, they won't for everybody - especially not those who've become so used to working around the problem, that a "solution" could expend more mental effort than following how everyone else does it already.

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> Just double click in the field to have all the text selected, then paste.

This won't work when using the primary selection (ie. middle-click paste) in X. Selecting the text wipes out the previous selection.

I might be missing your point, but I repeated the steps I mentioned in Ubuntu and have success. No middle click pasting though, just the OS X/Windows/everyone else standard of either context menu pasting or Ctrl+V. I recorded it too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZl3gTzqyKA

What am I missing?

For unix systems with X, you copy the text by selecting it. So when you want to paste a URL, selecting the old URL to delete it will overwrite the copied URL. You would need to delete it first, and then copy the URL you are after.

Again, though, I think I'm missing something. Isn't the windowing system Ubuntu uses X? In my video demo I "select" the contents of the text box, yet the existing contents of the clipboard remains. Or is this something Ubuntu does to keep us "other platform" migrators happy?

There is another clipboard that X users like using and don't like having obliterated whenever a program requires text selection. The ctrl-C/V clipboard and the highlight/middle-click clipboards are different.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html

There are actually two different buffers in X and they are each used a bit differently. See here for an explanation:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html

It is a pretty safe guess that you don't use Linux.

There, selecting the text automatically copies it, so when you paste you just paste back the text you just highlighted.

Maybe it does on your flavor of Linux but I gave it a try in Ubuntu and get the expected behavior (as on OS X and Windows). I even recorded the session and put it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZl3gTzqyKA

I used right click menu paste for the first run merely to show you what I was doing. I used Ctrl+V later on and got the same result.

Something's fishy here. At the very end you highlight the text field, but then you paste into it and something else (not what was just highlighted) goes in. The only time I have ever seen highlighting automatically get stuck into the clipboard (rather than the primary buffer) is when something like Glipper, Klipper, or Parcellite is screwing things up.

At 0:18, I Ctrl+C the word "google" as selected below. At 0:20, I paste the word "google" replacing the full URL showing in the search box. After that, I do nothing interesting beyond randomly select the URL (but I do nothing with it) - I just didn't cut the end off :-)

My:

- Firefox

- Gnome Terminal

- Dozens of Gnome Apps

- almost everything that is stock on recent distros

seem to disagree with you.

Yeah, emacs is the one app that I can think of that does copy-on-select, and I'm pretty sure even it can be configured to be more like Windows/GTK.

Just double click in the field to have all the text selected, then paste

Unless you are a certain nameless firewall manufacturer which doesn't go with convention, and mangles password fields into something like single-click-select (but only if changing the focus to them).

Then you just double click, watch it be highlighted then unhighlighted, then single click, which does nothing this time, then try to click and select and paste and realise it doesn't accept keyboard paste, only right-click-paste.

The problem with your UI suggestions is that even when they're logical and seem to make sense, they wont for every program. ;)

The problem with your UI suggestions is that even when they're logical and seem to make sense, they wont for every program. ;)

Except I didn't make any suggestions to change the UI. Instead, I'm saying leave it as it is, do it like everyone else does, and users already know how to deal with it :-) Your comment highlights exactly why I hold that belief - you've demonstrated that there are edge cases that I (and everyone else) never anticipated.

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