Re: [Usability] Selection vs. selected text

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 08:27 +0000, Joachim Noreiko wrote:
> --- Yevgen Muntyan <muntyan tamu edu> wrote:
> > I understand very well that this mode is just wrong
> > for those who
> > like/believes current GTK behavior is correct, and
> > what I really would love
> > to hear is what people think about ability to have
> > multiple selections.
> 
> I've just tried this with Gedit and Firefox: selecting
> text in a webpage made the selection in Gedit vanish!
> This feels wrong to me: the computer is interfering
> with my data. If I select something, I want it to stay
> that way, not vanish behind my back.

Honestly, this behavior is viciously annoying.  I do use
PRIMARY a lot, and I usually smack people whenever they
advocate dropping it.  My reasoning is that, if you don't
know about it, it will never interfere with your life.
The explicit clipboard works independently (except with
kitten-killing buggy applications like x-chat).

This one behavior, however, belies my entire argument.
In the interests of supporting a geeky (handy, no doubt,
but geeky) old feature, we are creating a behavior that
is undesirable by regular folks.

Standards were made to be interpreted.  We should just
re-interpret PRIMARY as "the most recent thing explicitly
selected by the user".  I'd put down money saying we don't
get a single complaint from anybody who uses PRIMARY.

--
Shaun