Re: Seeing <------> instead of tabs - how to disable ?

[kilgota banach math auburn edu]

On Wed, 21 May 2008, Felix Miata wrote:

> On 2008/05/21 11:40 (GMT-0500) Theodore Kilgore apparently typed:
>
> > While trying to do my work I do sometimes notice inconveniences and
> > glitches like what I have described above. Felix, I am curious. Did you
> > ever encounter what I have described, or do you do your work in such a
> > way that the situation just never came up, as I describe it? Wouldn't you
> > agree, now that the issue has been pointed out, that there is a problem?
>
> You certainly seem to have described a valid problem for the way you work,
> but not one I've ever encountered. All my systems have no gpm installed, or
> have had gpm turned off. On those occasions when I find it desirable to mouse
> copy and paste something from a file I have open in mc in Konsole, I usually
> cat the file in another Konsole tab, and copy & paste from that.

Well, interesting. and this just goes to show that different ones of us 
might settle into very different ways to do things. You do mention 
Konsole. To me, that implies that you are running KDE. I am not running 
KDE, but FVWM2 (again, highly customized to suit myself so it would not 
look to you like what you think of as FWWM). Moreover, I am one of those 
old geezers who really like Midnight Commander for what it can do in such 
an environment, too. To my mind, it is far better, far more flexible, and 
far more user friendly than any GUI file manager that I have ever 
encountered. So I use it all the time and have been doing so for quite a 
while (the Linux counter assigned to me #53625 a few years ago).

Now as to doing "cat" or "less" to the file in a third terminal, clearly I 
can do that, too. Sure. Anybody can.

But if you are working on the file with the editor and discussing 
something about the file with someone by e-mail and when the mouse-copying 
would obviously work very well, except for some little but very annoying 
glitch, doesn't it actually seem rather stupid to have to open yet another 
window just in order to do that copying?

Add to this, that the operation of mouse-copying did not even used to have 
that one little glitch, until the innovation of putting arrow characters 
in to signify tabbing has taken root. So in at least one type of situation 
functionality has been taken away in order to do something else better. 
That was one of my points. The other is that it seems to me it ought to 
have been possible to do that "something else" better, without causing any 
of these resulting problems at all.

Again, I do see why this change was introduced. It addresses a very valid 
concern. But it causes problems, too, and the problems could perhaps have 
been avoided. Mind you, problems like this often creep up on us and are 
unanticipated. The human-to-computer interface is probably one of the most 
vexing things to work on that exists. But that in turn means that those of 
us who work on such issues really need to be receptive when someone points 
out an outcome which was unanticipated.

May I suggest (again) doing the marking of tab spaces with something that 
does not pick up in a mouse-copy, possibly with color coding? I really do 
think that marking the tab spaces is a good idea and ought to be kept.  I 
also really do think that it could perhaps have been done in some less 
obtrusive way.

Theodore Kilgore