Hacker News Reader

Comment by yingbo | Hacker News Reader

I don't like the select = copy idea. When I browsing, I'd like to select a few words for no reason (well, more like a hight light, or reminds me to focus on them). I just want to select it, not copy them at all. And mid click paste? Little hard to control somehow: looks the mouse easily move a little when I do so.

I do like the context menu way.

View on HN

I'm also a compulsive highlighter, but fortunately x11 has distinct concepts between "primary selection" and "clipboard"

middle click is "query for the most recently selected thing and paste" while the clipboard requires an explicit copy action. In vim (even terminal vim) with X support they are the '"' (double quote) and '+' (plus sign) registers respectively. Most other applications let you copy and paste with CUA (or for terminals shift-modified CUA) keybindings.

So for something I plan on pasting longer term (or multiple times) I will typically use the clipboard. For quick "this thing needs to go here" with the mouse I use the primary selection.

I also agree that middle-click is nearly useless on a scrollwheel. Many mice have more than two buttons these days so you can always remap a function button though (as I mention in another thread, my trackball actually has 3 legit full-size top buttons, but prior to that I remapped the "browser forward" button to be middle).

I find I only use SELECTION if I'm going to paste whatever I copied immediately, but in those situations I do think it's a bit faster. If need to do anything else between copying and pasting I'll use CLIPBOARD instead.

I think this is the key insight. The old way makes selection a first class citizen of the windowing environment. If you view it not as copying, but taking advantage of the last selection, it makes a whole lot more sense.

This is not to say that explicit actions on the clipboard aren't useful. But, as an emacs user, I'm used to way more control over the kill ring than I typically see exercised on the clipboard.

For me it usually goes, select some text, try and paste, get a stupid scroll mode, try ctrl+v don't get what I want, go back to original document, select the text agian try and paste...

Eventually I remember to ctrl+c but it just flows so well, select then paste that it feels like a real step backwards going to a system that does not have it.

I do agree that the middle mouse button should be divorced from the scroll wheel.

You can bind C-S-c and C-S-v and other keystrokes, to get similar to what you get in a terminal.

That's probably because you don't have a "real" middle button and are trying to use the awkward to click scroll wheel instead.

If you want to go real old school and have a proper middle button, get an HP DY651A optical 3-button USB mouse (no scroll wheel).

I use the elecom EX-G trackball[1] for this reason. The default button mapping is middle-click on the scroll-wheel but it has 3 full-sized buttons on top as well and remapping is easy. There's nothing worse than middle-clicking to paste and having the scroll wheel scroll the screen slightly.

1: http://xahlee.info/kbd/elecom_trackball_ex-g.html

I prefer to just use a normal mice (In fact mine is not that normal because it is vertical). I'm on macOS and why bother to shop an old school one for rare usage? That's why I prefer the context menu too.

IBM scrollpoint nice have a real middle button without giving up a scroller.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com