Re: [Usability] Selection vs. selected text

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2006-03-22 at 11:50 -0600, Yevgen Muntyan wrote:
> Hello there,
> I apologize if I have sent this twice, I have some troubles with my mail 
> server.
> 
> Shaun McCance wrote:
> 
> > Honestly, this behavior is viciously annoying.  I do use
> > PRIMARY a lot, and I usually smack people whenever they
> > advocate dropping it. 
> 
> I do not advocate dropping it!!!

Sure, I didn't mean to imply you do.  I'm just
giving background on me and my thoughts on this
subject.  I've been annoyed by this behavior
for years now.

> 
> > [snip]
> > Standards were made to be interpreted.  We should just
> > re-interpret PRIMARY as "the most recent thing explicitly
> > selected by the user".
> >
> Well, this is what my patch in bugzilla does, and this is
> what my bug report says. Let me quote it:
> 
> If it's FALSE, let newly selected text steal primary, so that "select, 
> switch
> and press middle mouse button" still works; but selected text should not 
> get
> unselected if someone else acquires PRIMARY. Yes, it would mean that 
> "selected
> text != primary selection content", i.e. it would do what mozilla does. But
> this is way smaller problem when unselecting text nobody (at least not a 
> normal
> human who is editing text in gtk application and opens a dialog with an 
> entry
> inside) knows why. Not acquiring PRIMARY at all would be wrong because 
> 'select
> and use middle button' is a nice feature, and there is no reason to 
> remove it,
> as long as it doesn't cause troubles in normal operations.

Exactly.  You would no longer have a 1:1 correspondence
between PRIMARY and the one thing selected on the screen,
but PRIMARY would still get set each time you explicitly
select something.

I'd be very surprised if anybody lets PRIMARY hang around
for a long time and then looks around his screen to see
what's selected.  I think the typical use-case for PRIMARY
is select, paste, forget.

> > I'd put down money saying we don't
> > get a single complaint from anybody who uses PRIMARY.
> >  
> >
> Well, folks on gtk-devel-list seem to have different opinion
> about this ;) This is why I am proposing an option, not
> unconditional changing of GTK behaviour.

Yeah, well, if an option is what it takes to convince
people, I guess I would make that concession.  But I
honestly don't think it should be necessary.

Standards are nothing more than people getting together
and agreeing to do the same thing.  There's nothing to
stop people from getting together again and agreeing to
do something different.  Put bluntly, if a standard is
causing us to provide a suboptimal user experience, then
we should seriously consider how much we care about that
standard.

--
Shaun