GNOME & Firefox officially brain dead.

blackbird9

blackbird9

GNOME & Firefox Consider Disabling Middle Click Paste By Default: "An X11'ism...Dumpster Fire"​

GNOME & Firefox Consider Disabling Middle Click Paste By Default: "An X11'ism...Dumpster Fire" - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com www.phoronix.com

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I tried middle-click paste first time after reading that thread :p (worked fine Firefox on X11)

I don't mind it default-enabled, but never used it prior, haven't had a desire to try that, and would prefer it disabled to avoid accidentally pasting something (I disable touchpad gestures but single clickless pads would be the likely place to mis-middle click stuff).
 
unitrunker said:
That is a POLA violation.
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You remember we talk about GNOMEs here?

This worked before linux was first run, this worked for so long. But nobody uses it and it surprises people who run into it?
Rain makes you wet, as you will see when you go outside without an umbrella when it rains. Has been this for eternity. But I guess we found those who are stunned by that.
 
I try it when shift-ins doesn't work. But X.org isn't solid on it either. You should not forget copied content from the browser because the browser is closed. That's stupid.
 
Crivens said:
This worked before linux was first run, this worked for so long. But nobody uses it and it surprises people who run into it?
Rain makes you wet, as you will see when you go outside without an umbrella when it rains. Has been this for eternity. But I guess we found those who are stunned by that.
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Yep, that has been the reasoning at firefox for quite some time (~since they came up with their crappy 'quantum' garbage and drove away any real programmers and replaced them with 'designers'): Using the dumbest common denominator as an excuse for breaking and removing stuff that has worked for decades.
There's been so much exapmles for this BS over the last few years - e.g. removing the default behavior of the backspace key for going back, but I'm sure they found some ididot (very likely within their own rows) that shouldn't be allowed near a computer who was confused by that...
 
From the article:

Jordan Petridis argued in that GNOME pull request that middle-click paste is an "X11'ism" and that the setting could remain for those wanting to opt-in to enabling the functionality:
"This is an X11ism, originally an xsetting 1 which frequently results is in unexpected behavior when people pressing the middle mouse button.
Click to expand...

I'm sure Jordan is a nice guy ... but calling this an "x11-ism" is strange. Try this ...

Drop out of you x.org / xlibrary or wayland environment to a plain shell prompt. No DE. No WM.
Run tmux(1) (or screen if you prefer)
Type control-B, double quotes for a split screen (control-A for screen)
Type some text.
Type control-B, up arrow.
With the mouse (assuming moused), highlight the typed text above.
Now move the mouse to the other pane and click the mouse wheel (center mouse button).
Your highlighted text appears in the other pane.

No "X11" involved here.

Edit: see the "CAVEATS" clause at the bottom of the moused(1) man page.

CAVEATS
Cut and paste functions in the virtual console assume that there are
three buttons on the mouse. The logical button 1 (logical left) selects
a region of text in the console and copies it to the cut buffer. The
logical button 3 (logical right) extends the selected region. The
logical button 2 (logical middle) pastes the selected text at the text
cursor position. If the mouse has only two buttons, the middle, `paste'
button is not available. To obtain the paste function, use the -3 option
to emulate the middle button, or use the -m option to assign the physical
right button to the logical middle button: “-m 2=3”.
Click to expand...

Yes, I totally used the center button to paste this.
 
Wouldn't middle-click copy/paste be better at the input driver level? Like a xorg.conf synaptics option or libinput gsetting, before a higher-level browser having separate input settings from the DE or global handling (Xorg/Wayland)?
 
From the OP's linked article:
"This is a little known feature and behavior that leads into user confusion when they click the middle mouse button without knowing about its functionality. Most of the time, its also clicked by accident, and its very weird to have the clipboard dumped on such occasions.

The feature is also not discoverable at all, and even on the Freedesktop wiki page, the entirity of the "PRIMARY" selection is refferred to as an "easter egg"."
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I wrote long time ago:
H

Thread 'firefox is not unix, it is something horrible'

Do you agree?

If you find with google a pdf file, you cannot get the URL, because it downloads the file and presents a local URL to the downloaded file. In particular, you cannot do a bookmark to the original URL.

Copy with mouse key1 in the results of google and trying to paste with key 2 bring troubles.

It is highly configurable, one can configure a lot of stupidities, but it is from time to time unusable.

Well, a lot of strange things, in some way strange for a unix user with simple X11 with twm.
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SirDice said:
moused(8) copied the X11 behaviour?

Both CTRL-C and CTRL-V have a different function in a shell/console/terminal.
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Using ctrl-c to copy some code from a program running in a terminal might give you unintended consequences. They never tried this, as everything is surely GUI only, is it not? And yes, I use MMB in the console _a_lot_.

blackbird9 said:
Ctrl-c and ctrl-v come from windows, or maybe even from CUA (ibm). Unix is not windows.
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MS had the habit of mis-using existing standards. Like the .doc ending for documentation, ad nauseam.
No matter where this came from, the copy/paste mechanics were part of X11 for so long it might be legally old enough to retire, but this is not the way to argue it. It's working, it's the de-facto standard. We are going to have the next iteration after the 3-edged wheel now?
 
GNOME is dead for me since the arrival of GNOME 3.0 back in 2011.

Back then they axed a very nice working and sane desktop environment into a bad iOS ripoff - on the desktop.

Of course that didn't go well, and since not much has changed GNOME sucks still today with its "our devs know best" approach, still putting menus behind those dumb hamburger bars and so on.

So in short: who the fuck cares about what these idiots are again up to, who thought it was good idea to make a tablet GUI for a *NIX desktop?

Or as a disgruntled former GNOME user (Linus Torvalds) put it: "This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it."
 
hardworkingnewbie said:
Or as a disgruntled former GNOME user (Linus Torvalds) put it: "This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it."
Click to expand...
Apparently he changed his mind :p

Torvalds Says 'Use KDE' - Slashdot

An anonymous reader writes "Without tip-toeing around the matter, Linus Torvalds made his preference in the GNOME vs. KDE matter quite clear on the GNOME-usability list: "I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE. This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of...
slashdot.org

I think he mentioned using Fedora primarily in an interview: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9rua58/what_distros_does_linus_torvalds_use/
 
Once CDE finds the other displays and can use them, I vote for having CDE as the default desktop in FreeBSD base install - should we need one.
Interesting how the bloat from the past (compared to hand-tuned fvwm2) is now the slim one and the slim one turns into a swamp...
 
Espionage724 said:
Apparently he changed his mind :p

Torvalds Says 'Use KDE' - Slashdot

An anonymous reader writes "Without tip-toeing around the matter, Linus Torvalds made his preference in the GNOME vs. KDE matter quite clear on the GNOME-usability list: "I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE. This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of...
slashdot.org
Click to expand...
Compare my quote above with this words of Torvals:
Also, "Gnome seems to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'.""
Click to expand...
 
I don't like GNOME or Linus Torvalds' public persona, but it seems that most people like said DE and the Finnish gentleman, so what do I know. I also don't click on the middle button. I'm too clumsy.
 
Crivens said:
Once CDE finds the other displays and can use them, I vote for having CDE as the default desktop in FreeBSD base install - should we need one.
Interesting how the bloat from the past (compared to hand-tuned fvwm2) is now the slim one and the slim one turns into a swamp...
Click to expand...
But is CDE still maintained? Motif is pretty much dead, AFAIK. Is CDE still actively maintained?
 
Going by hazy memory, all the commercial Unix machines I've used (Solaris, HP-UX, Ultrix, others I forget) had 3 button mice and middle button was paste. Kind of fun when you got on a Mac with one mouse button and you had to hold down 6 different modifier keys to get multi-button behavior.
So this while not surprising given the source, but it's puzzling especially for FireFox.

I guess WaterFox, Librewolf are going to have optin enabled.


blackbird9 said:
But is CDE still maintained? Motif is pretty much dead, AFAIK. Is CDE still actively maintained?
Click to expand...


I would say ask cy@ for the definitive answer....
garaksarr

Other Thread 'CDE Users Unite!'

Does anyone use CDE as their daily driver here? If so, why?
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