Re: [Usability] Copy & paste problem

[Joachim Noreiko <jnoreiko yahoo com>]

--- Simon Howard <fraggle gmail com> wrote:

> On 5/26/06, Francesco Stablum <stablum gmail com>
> wrote:
> >  The problem is that there are two clipboard
> buffers and it can be very
> > annoying and conterintuitive to new unix/gnome
> users. Why not making a
> > single buffer?
> 
> Most users new to Unix are unlikely to know about
> the PRIMARY
> selection pasting method (select + middle click). 
> The problems are
> that you can select text to make a PRIMARY-style
> "copy" operation, but
> doing a "paste" using edit-paste will paste the
> CLIPBOARD selection
> instead, and similarly a middle-click will paste the
> PRIMARY
> selection, which doesn't work if you did edit-copy.
> 
> The problem is, the only way to combine the two
> systems would involve
> copying to the clipboard whenever text is selected. 
> This would make
> things even more confusing than they already are -
> imagine someone who
> selects some text in application 1, selects
> "edit-copy", then goes to
> application 2, selects some text (to replace) and
> hits "edit-paste".
> Nothing happens, because the clipboard was
> overwritten the second time
> he selected any text.
> 
> I'd say that users are unlikely to stumble across
> the PRIMARY select
> paste method anyway.  It doesn't interfere with the
> normal
> copy-and-paste method, which is what most Unix
> newbies are going to
> use.

This is true -- however, the existence of the PRIMARY
system does have an impact on users, because across
all GTK application windows, there can be only one
selection. This breaks users' expectations of what an
application is, because something they do in one
window can affect the state of selection in another.

There's a bug open for this, but most solutions
suggested so far are looking at ways to highlight the
selection considered for PRIMARY in some way, and
nothing proposed so far is entirely satisfactory.

Could there be a way to combine the two systems?

What about using middle-click-&-drag to select text to
copy, and middle-click to paste, using the regular clipboard?


		
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