GNOME Disabling Middle Click Paste

Having two completely separate mechanisms for copy-paste (not talking about the UI, but the underlying clipboard/selection) genuinely is confusing. It's never consistent across applications. Will I be able to middle-click paste from this web browser to that terminal, or from this emacs to that Skype window? Or do I need to select + Ctrl-Insert in this terminal to copy to that other window. Pretty much no way to know without learning it by trial and error. After almost two decades of using X I'm still surprised weekly about pasting the wrong thing due to this stuff. (And any time I paste text to an IRC terminal, I make sure to paste it to a throwaway window first to verify I've really got the right content).

And really, while I will continuously use select + middle-click to copy, it's only because of muscle memory. It's not some huge productivity boost over using the keyboard shortcuts. And once it stops working, the muscle memory can easily be retrained. (Remember how you probably complained when browsers stopped treating middle-click with an url in the selection as "open url"? I have no trouble admitting that I whined like hell about the massive loss in productivity it'd cause me. A month later I didn't particularly miss it, because I was automatically using a different workflow.)

The primary selection is a ridiculous vestige. Good riddance. I'm less enthusiastic about what they're proposing to waste the middle button on.

The design docs: https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/Selections

It all started with this whole: "Yeah - let's dumb it all down."-movement.

"Improvements" like these are just disgusting. (Edit: This falls into the same category of great ideas like the "spatial nautilus".)

(Just watch 20 seconds... you'll get it)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Z8K...

As a highlight-reader, I don't like automatic copy on selection. It's too easy to clobber the selection clipboard. It also affect usability on basic things like copying something from the terminal to paste into a browser's search box. Naturally, you want to delete the existing contents of the search box, but selecting it all to delete it clobbers the very thing you want to paste.

The setup I have on Windows with Cygwin and mintty is my preference. There is only one clipboard, and normal GUI selections don't have any affect on it. However, selection in the terminal copies into the clipboard, and middle-click in the terminal pastes the clipboard. Combine that with keyboard shortcuts for pasting the clipboard in the terminal, and a couple of command-line scripts (I call mine 'c' and 'p') for using copy and paste with pipes, and everything works pretty smoothly.

As it is on Linux, my 'c' reads stdin and stuffs it into both primary and clipboard buffers, while my 'p' takes an argument 's' to print out the primary buffer, otherwise it prints out the clipboard buffer. It's a pain when you end up pasting the wrong thing. Meanwhile, middle-click in UI apps is very rarely used because (a) it requires too much precision in aim - the text usually ends up exactly where you middle-click, rather than the current position of the cursor - and (b), I usually want paste to replace a selection, but the act of selection clobbers what I'm trying to paste...

Maybe they could work on something useful, like fixing memory leaks or making it not hugely bloated?

What I find catches me out more though, is the tap to click on a touch pad. I do like it, but I often get tripped up by it. I therefore declare It's flawed - rip it out ;)

Good to question these things.

I do think the chorded keyboard shortcuts that may be ingrained in many, are actually a difficult combo for the novice. I'd suggest that a mouse selection is easier, but alas that's a really difficult thing to do for mouse newbs too. I can still struggle with mouse text selection.

What a bunch of jerks--hasn't this been standard behavior for quite some time?