Re: selected text is PRIMARY?

[Dan Winship <danw novell com>]

Yevgen Muntyan wrote:
> The "whatever was selected last is in PRIMARY" is not that inconvenient,
> by the way. I use it, and
> it works fine for me. Almost never I select text, then select something
> else, then click middle button
> and discover that I pasted wrong stuff. Usually I select something and
> paste immediately.

Yeah, exactly. People are arguing as though users actually think of
PRIMARY/middle-click in terms of the ICCCM and the fdo spec, but that's
silly. Users think "I select text here, I paste it there". In order for
someone to be confused by Mozilla's "ambiguous" behavior, they'd have to
have a mental model of middle-click that was something like "I can
search the screen looking for selected text, and if I find something I
like, I can use middle-click to copy it somewhere else". Obviously no
one uses middle-click like that, any more than they expect to be able to
get useful results out of Ctrl+V without having done a Ctrl+C/Ctrl+X
shortly before. So I can't imagine how Mozilla's behavior would cause
any real-world problems.

(And the ICCCM has nothing to say on this topic, and the fdo spec only
weakly enforces the current behavior, by referring to
"currently-selected text", implying there can be only one selection. But
if you change that to "most recently-selected text" [or just allow
"currently-selected" to mean "most recently-selected"], then *poof*, you
get Mozilla's behavior, and everything still works.)

(Oh, and of course I agree that making this a configurable option is an
awful idea. If gtk were going to change it should just always behave the
Mozilla way.)

-- Dan