Re: cut and paste in gnome-terminal

[Mario Lang <mlang delysid org>]

Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM> writes:

> Hi Kenny
>
> There is currently no keyboard navigation for cut-and-paste using a
> terminal.  There has been extensive discussion of this in the past,
> but the main barrier to implementing it is that no one has ever come
> up with a proposal for doing it which doesn't conflict with other
> existing key bindings.
>
> One conclusion that some people have drawn is that cut-and-paste is
> the responsibility of the console application, not the terminal
> itself.  Many terminal-based applications (like vi, etc.) do provide
> selection and cut-and-paste capabilities, but most command shells do
> not.

That sounds more like an excuse than a solution to me :-)

> See bug #
>
> Possibly the best solution for this problem is for assistive
> technology such as gnopernicus to provide a cut-and-paste facility
> without needing to change the application itself, via the
> AccessibleText API.

Not that I am as deeply involved in this as you are, but
my personal feeling is that this also smells like a hack.  We will
need mouse motion at some point anyway (some windows apps come to mind, where
the only way around certain accessibility problems is to go and use
the mouse somehow).  I kind of like the approach that JAWS
is taking here, you can switch between two cursors, the
editing cursor, and the mouse.  If you are in mouse mode, your arrow
keys move the mouse, and the display (braille or speech) follows.
Actually, in that mode you can even use the real mouse to navigate,
since your braille display will follow it around.
So ideally, I'd just switch to mouse mode, go where I need to start my cutting,
hold shift, and move the cursor to where my cut ends...
This could also be useful for people with certain physical disabilities.
I've known a girl once who had real difficulties holding her hands still.
Mouse usage was not easy for her, since the pointer used to jump
around on the screen.  She even got a special keyboard where the
keys were kind of holes, so that she wouldnt accidentally miss them.
A simple cursor based mouse movement method would probably have helped her.
(Maybe we already have that, but we'll need to make sure that it works in
combination with screen readers like say, gnopernicus)

Just my 2 euro cents.

-- 
CYa,
  Mario